I Thought I Knew Stuff...

 So, I learned a lot today.

Strangely, it was about stuff that I thought I knew a fair amount about. I have in my stack of stuff somewhere a photocopy of a page from an old history textbook that had a graphic on the trans-Atlantic slave trade which clearly showed that by far the US received the fewest slaves... the Caribbean and S America being the biggest recipients of human lives. I know that the primary reason this is true is because slaveholders in the US were poorer and couldn't afford to treat their slaves as disposable, the way the non-US ones did: "oh, 300 died today from the heat? Increase the order for the next shipment!" as though they were chickens, not humans. Now, don't get me wrong, being a slave in America sucked, because being a slave sucks, but like today, it's better to be poor in the US than to be poor in pretty much anywhere else in the world. The famous economist and writer Walter Williams took a lot of flack for his assertion that the horrible evil of slavery meant that generations of black people escaped an early death in Africa, which is a good thing, if you are alive now in this country. If not for slavery, your bloodline wouldn't exist, your ancestors would have died poor in Africa. You understand his point, right? 

So, a guy I follow on Twitter, Leonydus Johnson, had a similar line of thought today:

Now, of course the discussion is rich, with people misinterpreting his point, which is why he added the "ultimate point" of course, but one person posted a link to an article about the messy history of free blacks owning slaves. in response to Joe's assertion there and someone asking for a source.

It's a very thorough article and a well-sourced one. I learned a lot. My point after all that is to say that the old proverb that history is written by the victors isn't quite right, is it? Modern "historians" (I'm looking at you 1619) seem to have left out this very important and messy part of our history. 

One, that the actual amount of slave owners was pretty small.

Two, that that number included free blacks.

Three, that no, they weren't just buying family members to protect them

Four, they did pretty well financially (despite the "systemic institutionalized racism" that supposedly plagues us to this very day).

Is any of this taught via the lens of CRT? Does Mrs White Fragility even know this, or X Kendi whatever? Indeed, does any high school US History have this in the curriculum?

Probably not, because it's messy. It obscures the depiction of white = slave owners = bad, even though it was an extreme minority of people in this country. I would challenge his assertion actually to say that any of us, white or black, are MORE likely to be descended from a slave than an owner!

Keep learning people.

On a sidenote, if a free black slave-owning business man (and his children) could become that successful in South Carolina including during the Civil War, staunchly supporting the Confederacy, even, what changed between now and then? I often think of how Harlem was during the 40s and 50s compared to the 70s thru today? What changed? I'll give you one guess....

What? Media Writes Crappy Headlines, Film At Eleven!

It's been particularly frustrating lately, especially here at home with the race-baiting headlines and the stark manipulations from the press.

I'll start with the national news, one that I think is pretty demonstrative of the typical way these things happen, and one that #1 has elucidated very effectively today (8/10/15).

Donald Trump said yet another stupid thing after the Republican Presidential Candidate's debate last Thursday, expressing his feelings about the moderator, Megyn Kelly pretty inarticulately (shocking!) and I have to tell you, that based on the tweets, FB posts, and headlines, for three days, until this morning, I thought he said this:

"She had blood coming out of her whatever"

Because of quotes like this from this CNN article: "Donald Trump's feud with Megyn Kelly escalated Friday night when he said the Fox News host had "blood coming out of her wherever" at this week's Republican debate, resulting in swift condemnation from conservatives and a major political event pulling its invitation to him." 


When, in fact, he said ""You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes," Trump told CNN's Don Lemon on Friday night. "Blood coming out of her wherever." (same article as above)

Watch the link and you'll see he was just struggling to get some words out and move on to the next topic. Trump is a personality, a loud, brash, self-aggrandizing creature of the American culture. I have no regard for him, never have, he's the type of Cait-kardashian-Kanye-honey boo boo-reality ilk that is a scourge upon our species, much less our culture, but he's getting totally hosed on this.

Sorta.

His poll numbers are up, so who gets the last word on this?

He has defended his remarks specifically that it's the hearers that implied something he didn't infer. Good for him.

Other stuff.

Ok, our local Fox affiliate has used this headline about a "19 year old college football player that was black and was shot by a police trainee": 

Trainee officer shoots unarmed college football player

The AP article begins: "An unarmed college football player was shot dead at a suburban Dallas car dealership by a trainee police officer during a middle-of-the-night burglary call. The death of 19-year-old Christian Taylor has raised some of the same questions as other recent police shootings involving unarmed suspects."

The article is so bad that I can't stand to read it, but it never explicitly states that the "victim" was committing a crime at the time (allegedly) but is sure to get some speculation from his father. This CNN article is better, using the AP story as its basis (or did the Fox affiliate edit it down to garbage? good question) getting around to the things he did that attracted police attention, but needlessly linking the Ferguson shooting of a year ago in attempt to paint it as racial (even though the Justice Dept came to the opposite conclusion).

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!


Lastly, a University of Cincinnati cop killed a guy the other week, and he's being dragged through the mud. I'm not going to defend him, because he had no reason to shoot the guy. I have a couple of observations, of course.

If you watch the video, he wasn't being confrontational, or jerky in any way to the guy he stopped. The guy was being a little low-grade difficult, but it escalated in a flash when he told the guy he wanted him to get out of the car. We had just seen both of the officer's hands, so the speed at which he ended up pulling his gun and shooting it is shocking.

Why? I have an answer for that, I think with all the anti-police media attention over the last year especially (thanks to the drive-by media's Ferguson fiasco) coupled with the targeting and killing of cops including one here in Cincinnati, cops are on edge. It's causing the rate of cops killing people to spike rather than decrease because they are rightly SCARED.

Now, to the specifics of the case, I think that he's going to get off on the murder charge because the tape doesn't show what he may or may not have suspected, smelled, or seen in the car as he talked to the victim who was, as it turns out, in addition to the legitimate reasons for the stop and questioning (no front plate, no driver's license on him), had a bottle of "air freshener" to cover the scent of the drugs and cash that was in the car.... Which is why the guy was a little evasive, didn't want to get out of the car, and did, in fact start to attempt to flee before he was needlessly shot. 

Let me repeat that: needlessly shot. He was a guy doing bad things, but the officer should not have shot him. 

His family placed flowers as a memorial on the campus of my alma mater, which is interesting as I don't think he was ever a student there, so why memorialize him there? Because the officer that killed him was a UC cop? I just think the location is weird, that's all, clearly the family should so something to memorialize him regardless of the the circumstances of his death. Allowing it on the campus, though, I think is an error as he was in possession of pot and cash; driving without a license in his possession; driving without a front plate at the time of his shooting. If that makes me some kind of monster, I can live with that.

Chris Rock on Race in Hollywood Is Epic

If you haven't seen it, Chris Rock (who I disagree with on stuff, but still like a lot!) has been writing and talking a lot lately with a new movie coming out, Ferguson, etc. This new essay is epic for several reasons, but I'd like to point out that he says something I have been saying for years (cue: confirmation bias). Our media is liberal but racist. Pretty white females as victims or perps get stories on 20/20 or Dateline while thousands upon thousands of black males get killed and it's not even noticed other than to scare white people from "going downtown" all across the county. The media (and they are all liberals, folks) portray black Americans in the context of crime almost exclusively.

The term "drive-by media" popularized by Rush Limbaugh is so fricking accurate.  This couples with my constant criticisms of sweeps month sensationalism and the ever popular "summer of" series, be it shark attacks, abductions, or West Nile Virus. Ask anyone who has had a reason to be on the news and they will tell you: they got important details completely wrong, or omitted details to create the narrative as they saw it, truth be damned.

Chris Rock isn't the first to make this observation, but he'll at least bring it to the forefront. The people who make our movies are led by scumbags (to allude to Charles Barkley!) molesting children, doing drugs, and excluding everyone that doesn't look or think like them.

We cut it out in Top Five, but there had been a scene where Kevin Hart, who plays my character’s agent, is in his office talking to me, and he finds out that “Zoolander” (Ben Stiller) is down the hall and he’s mad because none of the agents called him. He’s the only black agent at the agency, and there was a line in the movie like, “I’m the only black agent here. They never invite me to anything, and these people are liberals. This isn’t the Klan.

But forget whether Hollywood is black enough. A better question is: Is Hollywood Mexican enough? You’re in L.A, you’ve got to try not to hire Mexicans. It’s the most liberal town in the world, and there’s a part of it that’s kind of racist — not racist like “F— you, n——-” racist, but just an acceptance that there’s a slave state in L.A. There’s this acceptance that Mexicans are going to take care of white people in L.A. that doesn’t exist anywhere else. I remember I was renting a house in Beverly Park while doing some movie, and you just see all of the Mexican people at 8 o’clock in the morning in a line driving into Beverly Park like it’s General Motors. It’s this weird town.

You’re telling me no Mexicans are qualified to do anything at a studio? Really? Nothing but mop up? What are the odds that that’s true? The odds are, because people are people, that there’s probably a Mexican David Geffen mopping up for somebody’s company right now. The odds are that there’s probably a Mexican who’s that smart who’s never going to be given a shot. And it’s not about being given a shot to greenlight a movie because nobody is going to give you that — you’ve got to take that. The shot is that a Mexican guy or a black guy is qualified to go and give his opinion about how loud the boings are inDodgeball or whether it’s the right s—- sound you hear when Jeff Daniels is on the toilet in Dumb and Dumber. It’s like, “We only let white people do that.” This is a system where only white people can chime in on that. There would be a little naivete to sitting around and going, “Oh, no black person has ever greenlighted a movie,” but those other jobs? You’re kidding me, right? They don’t even require education. When you’re on the lower levels, they’re just about taste, nothing else. And you don’t have to go to Harvard to have taste.

Also, this should sting:

But if we’re going to just be honest and count dollars and seats and not look at skin color, Kevin Hart is the biggest comedian in the world. If Kevin Hart is playing 40,000 seats in a night and Jon Stewart is playing 3,000, the fact that Jon Stewart’s 3,000 are white means Kevin has to cross over? That makes no sense. If anybody needs to cross over, it’s the guy who’s selling 3,000 seats.

Awesome. And remember, this country is 67% white and 12% black. Suck it Stewart, you aren't that popular.

More epic talk:

I couldn’t have made Top Five at a studio. First of all, no one’s going to make a movie with a premise so little and artsy: a star putting out a movie and getting interviewed by a woman from The New York Times. I would have had to have three two-hour meetings explaining that black people also read The New York Times. A studio would’ve made it like Malibu’s Most Wanted. And never in a million years would they have allowed a scene where the rich guy comes back to the projects and actually gets along with everybody. No way. In most black movies — and in most black TV shows and even in most black plays — anyone with money or an education is evil, even movies made by black directors. They have to be saved by the poor people. This goes back to Good Times andWhat’s Happening!!

Go read the whole thing, but here's my parting shot: I remember when Ellen's sitcom tanked and people blamed homophobia. I disagreed, I thought it was because the show went from being about the characters to being about the character being gay, and it wasn't funny anymore. People clearly love Ellen, it seems, and trust me, we knew she was gay anyway.

I'll also throw in that several conservative types I follow say that if we want to win the culture back, just go make good art and the conservative message that may or may not be a part of it will follow. the problem with most "conservative" art right now is that it's conservative first and it isn't good quality art! Anyway, here's Chris Rock:

But there’s been progress. When I was on Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago, we did a sketch where I was Sasheer Zamata's dad and she had an Internet show. Twenty years ago when I was on Saturday Night Live, anything with black people on the show had to deal with race, and that sketch we did didn’t have anything to do with race. That was the beauty: The sketch is funny because it’s funny, and that’s the progress.

Yes, it is.

 

Baseball, Jack Robinson, Herman Cain, and These Modern Times

Well, I had an interesting conversation on the way to work this morning about politics, as usual, and all the GOP contenders for the nomination. Herman Cain came up, and we agreed that it would be great to have him as a President, although we disagreed on the 'why" a little.

For the most part, we like him, his ideas, his experiences, and his persona. I joke that it would be great to see the first Black President a Republican (hey, this idea the BHO isn't "black enough" comes from the LA Times) and that I'd want to vote for him to be "a part of history," but the reality is that it would be a great chance to smash that tired liberal notion that conservatives (and Republicans) are a bunch of bigot sexist homophobes. Electing a black Republican would show that it's the ideas that matter (the content of a person's character, if you will) and not the skin.

See, that's a charge that has really bothered me. I know in my heart that I am not racist, bigoted, sexist or homophobic, I was raised right and have lived right. I have walked the walk, I have experienced every race and creed with openness, I have judged people as individuals and not as members of some "group" as defined by others. I maintain relationships with people of all ideological, racial, and sexual persuasions and refused to be accused of bigotry by people that don't know me merely because they have some prejudicial view of "conservatives" or "republicans."

I would suggest to you that the real bigots live on the other side of the ideological aisle, they are the ones that see racism, sexism, and homophobia in every turn, that judge people by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character.

I suggest to you that the Great Society as instituted by the Johnson Administration has hurt black people in this country, if only in the attitude that they must be helped.  Have you seen what Harlem was like, when it was a bunch of successful businesses run by entrepreneurs who just happened to also be black? Before the government started "helping?"

The episode of Ken Burn's Baseball about the 1940's was on last night, and one thing was clear to me. In overcoming racism, we have come so far. I ached to hear the things that Jack (as his wife called him) Robinson endured as the pioneer in the Majors. To see a death threat from my hometown, that if he entered Crosley Field he was dead, pains me immeasurably. Yet, I know that this couldn't happen again, that kids today would be shocked and appalled that grownups acted this way, and that is fantastic. I also see the folks that used to be dressed so well going to games, and long for that type of self-esteem, that type of notion that "if I am going out in public, I must be dressed well," even as I sit at work in jeans....

Jack Robinson fought for his country only to return to the kind of racism that wouldn't let him sit in the front of the bus, and before Rosa Parks, he refused. The gas station owner that wouldn't let him use the restroom changed his mind when Jack turned and stopped the minor league team from pumping gas from this man. At risk of losing a hundred dollar sale (and future sales to this baseball team and its bus), he relented, as did many subsequent gas station owners, as told by Buck Owens.  That he was chosen as "the guy" because of this and because he had the fortitude to withstand all the garbage thrown his way is amazing, and how he handled it is a lesson for the ages, as, like Gandhi in some respects, he showed that that resistance (not exactly passive) moved many mountains.

So, if we moved Jack Robinson in a time machine to 2012, who would he vote for?