JamesLambJr.com

Learning Curve

2008-09-22T12:17:00.000-07:00

Since September 2nd, I've grappled with one major question: what does the outcome of the District 29 Democratic Party State Representative primary say about local politics? I fear that Mr. Cruz's sobering loss in the September 2nd Democratic Party primary speaks to our community's failures to forge and maintain an open and diverse Pima County Democratic Party, where local progressives, liberals and moderate Democrats band together to solve our community's problems, including laughable state spending on public education, disheartening unemployment and underemployment concerns, and serious misuse of our state's finite natural resources.

Yes, the Democratic Party's foremost interest involves electing Democrats to public office, but each and every one of us should scrutinize our electoral candidates to ensure that the Democrats we elect are the Democrats we need. I supported Ephraim Cruz because Ephraim Cruz is a Democrat who suffered for our shared ideals, who fought for those without power and privilege under our system. I never required the Democrat who simply parrots liberal talking points before liberal audiences like a patronizing Pinocchio jerkily animated by a low-budget James Carville wannabe in Geppetto drag.

Bottom line: a local campaign revolves around using political action to help one's neighbors. Most political candidates sound inauthentic, flat, and bored with their own dogma because candidates begin their odd sojourn in local politics filled with immense ambition and little else. Certainly Democratic candidates are decent folk who want clean air, low health insurance premiums for all and microwavable chicken dinners in every refrigerator, but most begin their campaigns with a benign abstractness about the entire deal, outside of their pet projects. Then they can't shut up.

You've seen the debate: Ephraim Cruz proves he's the world's foremost expert on immigration policy, Tom Prezelski hammered home his understanding of legislative minutia, Daniel Patterson emerged as some grey-haired mad scientist's experimental cross-pollinization between the AFL-CIO and Greenpeace, and Dr. Matt Heinz offered a wide range of sensible domestic policy proscriptions on all manner of serious local issues, all of which focused solely on his interest in health care. No money in the state budget? I'm a doctor. I heal people. Mining interests pollute the state's potable groundwater? I'm a doctor. I heal people. No money for public education? I'm a doctor. I heal people.

To attend that debate was like watching cable television with an eleven year old Halo aficionado raised on Pop Tarts and Pop Rocks. One second Jorge Ramos debates militarized borders with Lou Dobbs, the next Luca and Abby fight to save their newborn baby on a syndicated episode of ER. Somewhere in between flashes a touching tribute to Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, but that's interrupted to display gaunt and trendy Hollywood writers picketing and chanting to argue in favor of aborting your favorite television shows to beg for DVD royalties, and you close your eyes to forget the insanity, because no one's really talking about you!

Want to know what I learned? Our elected officials should reflect who we are and where we live. Anyone who purports to represent your interests should be able to logically and succinctly discuss those interests in public, and not himself ad nauseam. Local elections, in my opinion, are the largest contributor to voter apathy, because here the orthodox political commentary monopoly respects only pathetic micro-targeting and closed-circuit networking campaigns when candidates win friends and influence voters. Nothing more.

Average voters are not seriously asked to participate -- not by their local media, and not by their local political parties. It's not hard to get people interested: talk about what they care about, not what the Sierra Club or Planned Parenthood or the Arizona Education Association wants you to care about. In District 29, no one cares about the food you grow at home or the hybrid car you drive -- especially when a collegiate student body president is shot a few blocks from where you live. Don't tell me about the bed and breakfast statutes you've changed during your time in office when Tucsonans are laid off from their jobs all over.

Frankly, it became too simple to ignore the interests of the residents of District 29 in the mad dash to appeal to the small subset of plugged-in, Establishment Democratic voters in District 29. You can learn all manner of useful information about a place just by walking around the neighborhood, and I learned that much of South and Southeast Tucson present neglected neighborhoods, where people fend for themselves and nothing ever really changes.

I'll never forget: one Saturday my girlfriend and I canvassed Democrats in a South Tucson neighborhood filled with Richard Elias & Ramon Valadez signs, pit bulls, iron barred windows, liquor stores, and eight foot tall wire and iron fencing around every home. Every single home. You can't canvass folk you can't reach, and the dogs and fences obstructed more than we would have liked. Throughout that day, however, the Unisource Energy Tower, the tallest office building I've seen in Tucson, injected itself over these lower middle class homes, a mocking portrait of glass and steel opulence, Southern Arizona's answer to Mount Olympus.

That's the most galling part of this story. We Democrats know the local problems, and how to fix them. When schools suffer from anemic public funding and nonexistent public interest, we Democrats know who is hurt, and who is hurt most abundantly. We know who is most affected by rising gas prices and urban sprawl. We know who has health insurance, and who needs AHCCCS. We know that increased melanin content can decrease meaningful life choices in for many Tucsonans, statistically speaking. But we steadfastly refuse to discuss these issues during election season, to inform our fellow citizens of the reasons economic calamities befall them, and what they can do about it. We allow our elections to revolve around the simple and the mundane, the meaningless and the comical, the prurient and the personal. We cheapen the suffrage too many fight and bleed and die for when our politics devolves into the childish bickering and underdeveloped thinking that usually characterize local politics throughout our tortured and resilient county.

Seriously, all the election integrity advocates in Pima County have it wrong. I do not doubt their sincerity when they push for clean and fair and auditable elections, but the most glaring and serious threat to local democracy in Pima County is voter apathy. What Brad Nelson and Chuck Huckleberry do with the vote after its cast isn't really relevant when the vote itself approaches numerical insignificance. In District 29, 31,588 citizens are registered Democrats, yet only 8,797 voted in the September 2nd primary, with seven candidates. I toured polling places throughout District 29 on election day, only to find that with only a few hours left at some of the largest districts, barely fifty or sixty people total showed up to vote all day long. Really, if a voter didn't already personally know a candidate, or have some connection to the local Democratic Party or a local special interest group, chances are they didn't even know that September 2nd was Election Day.

Make no mistake -- Tucson Democrats rejected Ephraim Cruz. Out of seven candidates, Mr. Cruz won sixth place, only ahead of the nonexistent campaign of Gil Guerra. Our campaign visited over five thousand households in District 29, spent $21,875.00 in campaign funds, and mobilized volunteers throughout the blistering summer months to contact voters directly about Ephraim Cruz's message for change in Southern Arizona. Our mechanics proved effective; voters heard our radio advertisements, saw our television commercial, received our mailing, read our flyers, noticed our door hangers, and spoke with our campaign volunteers, often on multiple occasions. None of it worked.

Senator Barack Obama famously ripped author Alice Walker in a recent speech when he pronounced "We are the change we've been waiting for!" Maybe that's true. But we are also the problem we've been avoiding. Public outreach to increase both registered Democrats and voter turnout could provide the majorities we need in Phoenix to actually fix the public education and health care access issues that so plague this state. Get involved.

Pressure

2008-07-05T17:01:00.000-07:00

Killer Mike. Ice Cube.

Painful, unflinching truth. Pay attention.

Can You Afford Insurance?

2008-04-09T06:50:00.000-07:00

Many non-Asian American people of color indulge the common fantasy that Asian Americans as a group do not suffer from American racism. For these pitiful anonymous, Asian Americans as a group have so ingratiated themselves into White supremacist America that the phrase 'model minority myth' has become a hollow throwaway from the arrogantly underprivileged towards those they consider lucky at best, and unimportant usually.

Personally, I found this phenomena most prevalent during my Cornell days where, from my perspective, the most international and ethnically diverse Ivy League university in this nation never once encouraged intense dialogue within its student body on multiculturalism and diversity. Now, the campus operated daily with those buzzwords; even the Campus Life residence hall directors and building managers and cafeteria workers and janitors attended monotonous meetings without end designed to indoctrinate cross-cultural unity perspectives in every facet of student life, all to little effect.

'Multiculturalism' and 'diversity', like their precursor 'integration', serve one purpose: to convince young scions of the privileged and alienated majority that people of color matter enough to their personal and professional lives that basic social interaction between the races must emerge to preserve the Establishment. This interaction, social sometimes but financial usually, is literally the only way the iconic institutions of the United States of America - our imperiled dollar, our vaunted ingenuity, our inhuman military supremacy - can thrive amid the real and imagined geopolitical Katrinas of the Twenty-First Century - an international energy crisis, global warming, stateless terrorism, welfare state financial meltdown, etc. Leave it to academia to decipher Ben Franklin's handwriting on the dusty walls of our nationally forgotten past -- after a building takeover best described as a bastardized hybrid between passionate student activism and the death of liberalism itself shocks Cayuga's genius into paying attention.

The point? In balkanized liberal America, no one offers guidance on race to those the majority expects to teach. At Cornell, one on my favorite sayings was "I don't get paid to be your professional Negrologist, and I wouldn't cash that check if you offered." (I'm obviously paraphrasing; this is a family blog.) But I'm convinced - then and now - that a major reason so many non-Asian American people of color express ambivalence and/or outright contempt for the racialized plight of Asian Americans derives from the unchallenged concept that Asian Americans are all smart, wealthy, hardworking, and too polite to cause trouble. What's more, in the absence of consensus among Asian Americans on the political worth of the model minority myth, many non-Asians indulge a defensive antagonism toward Asian American politics, one that excludes Asian Americans from much of the anti-racism activism in this country.

Even in 2008, when national media covers a race story, it involves the senseless murder of an African American teenager in Los Angeles, or Newark, or Washington D.C. It involves the influx of undocumented workers from our porous southern border who wish for nothing more from this country than to work hard at backbreaking labor in exploitative plantation conditions just to provide the rest of us with cheap lettuce (and benefit from the American welfare state, of course). Race in America involves the vision of an untried and brilliant biracial Senator who offers national unity -- wearing racial absolution's summer Sean John -- to mainstream White America, and the automatically beneath contempt sermons of his respected and beloved pastor, immortalized after decades of spiritual and political service to the Chicago African American community as a frothing, rabid throwback of a forgotten era when Whites were a silent majority and Blacks like the good Reverend deserved the water hoses and German shepherds for 'stirrin' up the good Negroes'.

Mind you - nowhere in our current race dialogue can Asian Americans speak about themselves. Nowhere.

And frankly, we lose something important this way, when some people of color, usually African Americans, are always called on to discuss themselves. America defines race dialogue today as teaching White people the specific racial etiquette necessary to never under any circumstances allow a person of color to detect their individual racism or their individual benefits from the institutional racism constructed by Whites past, and to prevent any real racial dialogue at any time for any reason that any White person must engage and/or respect. When people of color employ this dynamic publicly, I consider it selling melanin, and we should never forget that the whole world lines up for this new-age auction block. Just ask Juan Williams. And Boyce Watkins, for that matter.

None of us gain encouragement to look beyond our own racial or ethnic or gendered or economic oppressions in this country. Between reality television's faux-documentary visual immediacy where Viacom cameras offer a behind-the-scenes gaze on twenty-two year old oiled, muscular Caucasoid cavemen who consume enough Budweiser in thirty minutes to piss alcohol throughout the insipid physical challenges that offer money and prestige to the moronic and pathetic, between popular music's endless parade of gaudy, half-naked thirty-plus songstresses still begging you the consumer to inject the mountains of China White necessary to believe the Duchess is only twenty-five (and could ever sing), between the ever-present U.S. Marines recruitment commercials featuring all the dirt and grime and explosions a Santa Monica sound stage can glean from wartime Tikrit footage and a Puddle of Mudd single, between the self-centered rappers who devolve Black masculinity amid urban blight into bulging muscles glistening with baby oil and meaningless beefs over money, 'hoes and clothes to replace lyrical content with insipid controversy, between the cable-news pundits who sell introverted xenophobia and unapologetic racism in a folksy Main Street cadence ripped from President Ronald Reagan himself, the master at hate-your-neighbor politics, between the Ferraro feminists who despise Sambo success in exactly that language and hate their own booty shorts-clad Obama Girl daughters in the New York Times Sunday opinion page and the Wright "revolutionaries" who bellow and scream and screech over a basic Fuck Whitey! speech so they can gather the strength to serve Missy Anne Ferraro in our modern corporate big house with the marble tile and wood-grain tables and plasma screen televisions in the slave quarters' break room -- between all the insanity living in America generates the Millennium Generation has progressed into the All About Me! Generation, and our anemic politics panic at the disco.

Progressed, not evolved. A new study lays waste the claim that all Asian Americans are wealthy enough to afford healthcare in this nation, and that Asian American healthcare concerns do not exist. Pockets of economic uncertainty derived from small business ownership have left the rates of healthcare insurance ownership abysmally low for Korean Americans, and this study provides much more incentive for Americans to elect a President concerned with slashing the exorbitant costs from our current system while we push for universal healthcare. Also, this study encourages our nation to stop treating people as if they emerge from monolithic, homogenized groups. Poverty and lack of access to healthcare exists among us all, even the so-called model minorities among us, and a concerted focus on the specific groups affected by these problems, whether inner-city African Americans, immigrant Mexican Americans, small-business owning Korean Americans or working poor Native Hawaiians, would in my opinion, go a long way towards crafting and executing needed solutions, while all of us learn to look at each other without typecasting.

And we'd better: I work for a political campaign right now, and I don't have insurance. I can't afford it.

*Originally published at Reappropriate.com

Grow Up.

2008-03-26T10:55:00.000-07:00

I'd never heard of Asiance Magazine before Jenn wrote this post, and after reading Ms. Bandong's article I doubt I'll return to that site. But while I find the gross characterizations of Asian men in Ms. Bandong's piece unfortunate, I don't understand why every writer who pens anti-Asian male fluff pieces warrants a letter-writing campaign. Certainly people can pursue justice however they see fit, so long as they aren't breaking laws, but I'm a little shocked that people would increase Asiance Magazine public profile with this outcry.

Further, I'm bothered that an obvious 'chick-lit' piece warrants this controversy. I haven't read any more from Ms. Bandong outside of this offending piece, but I would hardly describe that piece as 'feminist' anymore than I'd describe HBO's Sex in the City as 'feminist'. Ms. Bandong wrote a simplistic op-ed detailing her desire for racially fueled excitement based around cultural offence toward (or cultural ignorance of) her family's traditions and culture. That's not female empowerment, or gender equality - it's just adolescent. Ms. Bandong reminded me of teenage girls who pay for tongue and belly button piercings to upset their middle class parents' hard-won suburban apple cart. Her juvenile assumptions that one could build a more exciting relationship with a person who either does not know your family's culture or could care less about abiding by their cultural parameters in their household stuck me as simply uninformed or uncaring about the family disturbances and ostracism those situations create.

And I'm a guy who did not grow up in a household where I removed my shoes upon entering. I dislike doing that now. That's not how I was raised. But when I enter someone else's home and that's what they do, I follow suit. It's their home, after all, and no one ever needed to cajole me into that small common courtesy.

The point? There are serious feminist issues in many American communities of color that minority men have yet to embrace or understand, but when people mistake whimsical dating ruminations for the Asian American answer to The Second Sex, the unneeded and dehumanizing hyperbole abounds all over. Ms. Bandong's piece has nothing to do with feminism - it involves a young woman's immature self-justifications for dating non-Asian men - justifications so below-the-radar unimportant that the minor outcry represented here makes absolutely zero sense.

Lastly - and this is what really bothers me - why can't some Asian American men admit that minority feminism can evolve? What is the problem? I don't expect Black feminists to parrot Sojourner Truth at a Tavis Smiley conference in 2008. Black feminism concerned labor issues then and now, but today's glass ceiling issues must contend with thirty years of higher education advancement where Black women outpace Black men in matriculation and graduation rates. The point isn't that Black sexism has died or that Black feminism is outmoded because by some measures Black women achieve educational and professional success at higher and faster rates than Black men - it's that Black feminism itself must and has evolved to combat other issues that harm Black people in general and Black women in particular: the HIV/AIDS epidemic that exploded among Black women in the past twenty years, for example.

So when Asian men try to assume that all Asian American feminism can be distilled into the political positions or literary licenses on Maxine Hong Kingston or Amy Tan, they pretend that Asian American feminism can't change to suit their own anti-feminist agenda. Yes, given differences in tone and debate topic, this sometimes crosses the rhetorical demilitarized zone into a sexist country where Asian females are likened to humanity's corporate pleasure providers, posable and disposable, and no one - especially Asian men - has to respect their bodies or minds.

I'm convinced that this phenomena lies at the heart of every online Asian male backlash against Asian American feminism I've ever read. To me, it's not that different from the anti-Black female backlash that Anita Hill endured when she testified against Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. On some level, it didn't matter to some professional and public Black men that Justice Thomas was at best a C-level legal mind who spent his entire career dismantling the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and New Deal Keynesian economic policies; no for some, all that mattered was that a Black man had a chance to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States of America, and that a Black woman threatened to destroy that chance. Enter knee-jerk sexism as 'defense of the race', where 'the race' devolves into an aggrieved boys' club without social constraints in it's hatred of uppity women who assert their stories and their pain. If Anita Hill were Chinese, she would have been called a SOW.

So that's the state of gendered discourse in the Asian American community today - men add porcine qualities to the sexist overkill of the phrase 'sellout whore', causing very few Asian American women to brave the sexist backlash online long enough to develop lasting institutions that nurture Asian American feminist thought. Not for nothing, but Reappropriate.com did have a sizable amount of female posters over the years; I fear the unreasonable craziness and personal attacks during repeated interracial relationship debates from Asian American men have taught many women not to comment.

And that's just sad.

Because it shows that minority sexism exists, has real consequences in the real world, and damages the range of acceptable commentary in minority communities. Denying feminism's utility matters. Antagonism toward interracial dating by Asian American women - and all the anti-Asian female misogyny and sexism that always emergent topic provides - has become the shibboleth that Asian men use to unify their community online, and this byte-sized good ol' boys networking dehumanizes and disrespects Asian women as much as any Chinese Laundry advertisement or mail-order bride webpage or Kobe Tai 'love you long time' pornography.

So no, I don't condemn Ms. Bandong. I ask her to perform the same task I ask of many of the Asian American men I've read in comments here, and on Fighting 44's and Model Minority.com.

Grow up.

Update: Jaehwan pens a response blog on the Fighting 44's site. Although I fear that Jaehwan's perspective clings desperately to the unnecessary and unfair notion that Asian American feminism is irrevocably defined by Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, his argument provides a useful and well-written counterargument to the views presented here (even if I don't agree with it), so check it out. (3/27/08, 7:33 AM PST)

No Jack Kennedy

2007-12-06T08:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/06/AR2007120600569.html?hpid=topnews

Gov. Romney's speech answered nothing, and hid in our Constitutional freedom of religion protections in order to justify his silence. He basically told evangelical Christian Republicans 'I share your values, let's not quibble on the details'. Perhaps that would work for many of them, since they'd rather have a Pastor in Chief than a President who's intellectually curious enough to interrogate the frailties of many evangelical public policy proscriptions.

Basically, any GOP candidate who shouts 'I share your values; let me beat Hillary Clinton and/or Barack Obama!' will find GOP primary voters willing to listen. Romney made that point to those people with his lines opposing a 'religion of secularism' but if one doesn't happen to be a GOP primary voter, Romney's speech presented more uncritical patriotic fluff with a sprinkling of salty Holy Water.

Bottom line: Nothing I saw today convinced me that Gov. Romney would lose the GOP nomination. As a African American atheist who votes Democratic, Gov. Romney does not share my values, and probably doesn't want to. But at least with atheism, one thinks critically about established beliefs. Gov. Romney offered no detailed explanations on Mormonism, and that makes him both a useful GOP Presidential candidate and a terrible option for the highest executive office in our country.

Stomp the Last Dance or Die Tryin'

2007-09-24T03:00:00.000-07:00

After reading a recent post on Racialicious.com by founder Carmen Van Kerckhove on September 21, 2007, I Can't Wait to 'Feel the Noise', I wrote the following response. The comment didn't appear on the Racialicious site (probably a technical error because of its length) so I have reproduced the comment here.

For context, watch the following preview:

Next, Carmen's commentary:

Yesssssssssssssss!

I can't wait to Netflix this. Long-time Racialicious
readers will know how much I love movies with multiple dance-offs. But this movie looks extra-special because it stars that tiny little magical dancing machine, Omarion!

(My dream dance-off would be Omarion vs. Chris Brown. Omarion would crrrrrrush him.)

It must be so effortless to make these movies, since they all follow the exact same script.

A young man gets into trouble at home, so his parents send him away for a change of scenery. He sees a hot girl and is immediately infatuated. But even though she clearly wants him, she doesn't want to leave her evil boyfriend because he's powerful and handsome.

The troubled young man gets involved in the subculture (stepping, marching bands, breaking) of this new environment but fumbles, humiliating himself. He finds out about A Big Event (competition, tournament, talent show) that will allow him to redeem his honor.

After a montage of him training, interspersed with him flirting with the girl, the movie culminates with The Big Event. Just when you think he's about to lose, he delivers a crushing blow to the Evil Handsome Guy, winning his dignity and the girl! Woohoo!

Tiny little magical dancing machine? ....

I know what's worse. The undeniable fact that Black male entertainers like Omarion routinely appear in moralistic minstrel shows greenlit by Hollywood to consume African American entertainment dollars by devolving Black masculinity to complicated precision dancing and/or baby-oil drenched Mandingo warrior swagger clearly presents a more disgusting problem than an uncritical throwaway reference that dehumanizes a Black man by calling him a 'tiny little magical dancing machine'.

I can't say that I care very much right now, though. I read Racialicious.com because it focuses on racist symbolism in popular culture, the very phenomenon with which so many supposedly liberal, supposedly anti-oppression people have trouble.

In their defense of the mainstream, these faux liberals offer the point that obvious fiction can't possibly tell us much about ourselves, so if John Q. American sometimes enjoys watching hip hop movies with hypersexualized thugs who sport shiny nickel-plated Glocks and scantily clad women of color bouncing their rounder portions, then maybe market forces dictate the only useful morality.

Racialicious.com opposes such cynical logic, and I've always respected that. So, after reading this post, I felt confused. Carmen, you rightly discuss the obvious formula in these Stomp the Last Dance or Die Tryin' flicks, but your attempt to characterize Omarion as a skilled dancer immediately conjured images of immense physical skill masked in blackface, and cast Omarion as a copasetic Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, skilled and subservient, whose fantastic entertainment forces forgetfulness of his personal political plight.

Omarion is not a machine. When we see acrobatic dancing from Black men, its all too easy to dissect the skill from the humanity, and focus on the skill alone. I find that dangerous, and believe that it only increases the gulf of racial difference that posits African Americans as the Other.

Maybe the real problem here remains the fact that entertainers like Omarion, Chris Brown, and Usher appear so happy to dance for mainstream audiences that cooning becomes an inevitable result for the American viewer. Every time people catch Chris Brown's genial smile during a performance - no small feat considering the rambunctious bouncing and epileptic jerking - I wonder if they mentally shade burnt cork and firetruck red Max Factor on Brown's broad smile. Perhaps people view Black male physical skill as something otherworldly and superhuman, so that Black male physical skill in general becomes something designed to entertain only, like a plastic toy from Mattel.

I don't think it matters though. It doesn't take much to remember the humanity of the Negro entertainer, and frankly, we have to. To lose that focus devolves athletic Black entertainers from shining examples of human focus and training to mechanical animals bred for mainstream merriment, and that's just a little too Dixie for my tastes.

Ahem.

2007-04-26T02:06:00.000-07:00

No excuses. I stopped writing here because of my ego. I never translated my writing style into hypertext. I'm cutting off comments. For all feedback, email me at jlamb1313@gmail.com.

Thank you.

The Revenge of C. DeLores Tucker

2006-10-31T21:30:00.000-08:00

I got this Indian squaw the day that I met her
Asked her what tribe she with, red dot or feather?
She said: "All you need to know is I'm not a ho
And to get with me you better be Chief Lots-a-Dough."

-Jay-Z, "Girls, Girls, Girls", The Blueprint

Southside I'ma ride till the gas gone
I wish I could call Jesus up on the phone
Like "Lord, I'm still burnin' from the slave trade
Can't reproduce cuz our folks got AIDS..."
But black folks is killin' black folks, not gays!
I spray the AK and pray; why were you late?

-David Banner, "Crossroads", Certified

Peruse the sistagirl blues over at the celebrated minority feminist blog Blackademic these days and parachute into pockmarked, dystopian terrain, another acrimonious battleground cast in midnight dawn where brother clobbers sister to enforce his ideological hegemony within the darker nation and sister lacerates brother to assume her moral omnipotence over the Black body politic. Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee's honored and respected African American gender equality proves a distant detente amid the Black community's historically uncivil war of the sexes. Today, African American HIV infections spiral exponentially.

Every modern African American creative outlet betrays this divide. Faux gangster G-Unit troubadours boast Pyrrhic victories over Buffie the Body's absentee inhibitions in ghostwritten gutter anthems featured on urban airwaves to promote Black nationalist hedonism over fertile black soil, all to shock and awe Bill O'Reilly Americana, too moral and upright and Christian to welcome Mandingo masochism into the American mosaic. Hip hop instigates intra-racial sexual ownership, commodifies the conscious chattel slavery of Black women by Black men for global human consumption. The revolutionary Snoop Dogg fleshes out Stokley Carmichael sexual politics: the only position for women in hip hop is prone.

Outside of the promotion of healthy female body image to the global village (only in comparison to the Mary Kate Olsen model), hip hop exploits Black femininity for Soundscan and Rolling Stone, devolves the conscious daughters of Mary Church Terrell and Mary McCloud Bethune into broken crack addict songbirds and quasi-masculine twisted sisters. Today's around-the-way girl smiles awkwardly, bobs her head to the latest Ciara & Jazze Pha club banger. Her caramel mocha cheek's razor-thin pink scar tissue twists sympathy from practiced conservative cynicism. She's survived gang initiation and gang rape, juvenile hall and teenage pregnancy. Her once athletic, lithe, vibrant Black body now betrays post-partum stretch marks and purple-pink Kaposi's sarcoma lesions. I can't return her smile. Hip hop abandoned this poor Black child, the promiscuous anonymous sex positive feminists never consider.

Hip hop's causal listening casualties attest to its crass consumerism, apathetic amorality, and syncopated sexism. Of course hip hop hates women -- hip hop hates everything. Young Jeezy, the portly Snowman whose t-shirt memorabilia and Dr. Seuss lyricism glorifies Southern street-level cocaine transactions, interests Columbine's children in new-age Negro nihilism for Island Def Jam Music Group's benefit. Marketable immorality will not respect women, especially African American women, a demographic so patently defined by popular culture that authentic sistagirl femininity rests upon the capable shoulders of executive producer Kelsey Grammer. Girlfriends across America impose chemical warfare upon their follicles; they perm and tease and fry their kinky ethnic gifts into processed perversions of Nicole Kidman and Keira Knightley, yet any rapper who calls any sista a bitch for any reason in any song unmasks as a irredeemable misogynist, ignored by decent people everywhere.

NYOIL proved ill prepared to defend his creativity against charges of sexism and misogyny. His controversial YouTube offering, "Y'all Should All Get Lynched", delivers an audiovisual middle finger directed toward today's hood rich hip hop headliners, and critiques with blunt naivete so-called musicians who mass market elementary off-color English end-rhyme to socialize and stereotype self-defeating behaviors into youthful African Americana for global profit. NYOIL does not produce theme music for Disney. The video abounds with Dick Cheney candor; near the end I wondered if this underground offering would link Lil Kim's gaudy sexuality with mushroom clouds. But Black feminist attacks against "Y'all Should All Get Lynched" for misogyny parallel conservative Christian attacks against Fahrenheit 9/11 for unbalanced journalism. Simple shit cannot soothe one's personal agenda. This video displays an angry rant, an audiovisual op-ed, a YouTube diatribe. The new millennium Madd Rapper bellows a simple scream in solidarity with the downtrodden and the insane, the shadowy alcoholics and broken obsidian who dot the Manhattan avenue and clutter the Georgian trap. How many Blackademics would he care about?

Repress nausea; witness the rage of a worthless class. NYOIL's "Y'all Should All Get Lynched" speaks directly to the undifferentiated Black masses, to admonish rap celebrities who waste their powers of persuasion sliding credit cards between voluptuous caramel buttocks, an African American Express Kanye West never expected but probably enjoyed. In turn, online Black feminists admonished NYOIL for anti-melanin misogyny, for pseudo-conscious intra-communal division of Black people through throwaway sexism. One could make the cliche 'crabs in a barrel' reference, but what's the point? As long as various African American constituencies bludgeon each other with Louisville Slugger wedge issues worthless electoral anachronisms like 'the African American vote' or 'Black Power!' or 'We Shall Overcome!' will continue to dissolve the collective philosophical and cultural underpinnings of politicized Blackness. Your skin doesn't matter if your people don't exist.

That's the problem with wedge issues: they all matter, and should matter to all. Misogyny kills people. Sexism breeds date rape and domestic abuse, encourages unhealthy promiscuity and rising single parenthood in the Black community. Poverty persists in urban Black enclaves in part because today's sexist Black machismo disregards male responsibilities of economic production and child rearing, thereby strangling the traditional nuclear family within African Americana. Even without Senator Rick Santorum histrionics, the most radical feminists of color must admit this sad phenomenon currently aerates Black 'lifting as we climb' propaganda, not to mention African American community safety, public health, and buying power. Therefore, African Americans should never devolve misogyny to throwaway language in underground rap, especially when the obvious thesis of this example in part decries the prepackaged misogyny that's killing Black people. Deal with the real: misogyny means more than simple hatespeech.

And make no mistake, NYOIL's "Y'all Should All Get Lynched" presents simple hatespeech, in every sense. Still, his Negro proletariat solidarity bleeds through what amounts to the most frighteningly cynical anti-African American oppression tool reclamation project since Sean Combs' "Vote or Die!" white T's. To recast lynching as justifiable homicide to combat the American commercialism that consistently posits the Black man as narcissistic sociopath and the Black woman as nymphomaniac whore shatters the strongest Christopher Meloni constitution, but before radical Black feminism raises its nappy Tracy Chapman dreadlocks, one would think that lynch law's impossible misappropriation here could be addressed, at least.

You'll never find NYOIL on the cover of Essence. Still, his elementary school polemics clearly identified mainstream hip hop's racist dehumanization of Black women as an immediate developmental concern for African Americana's vulnerable young women. To overlook this fact in order to pepper NYOIL with acidic criticism disrespects only the Black feminist, and characterizes her as a self-interested rabble-rouser ignorant of all logic and reason outside her personal agenda, the uneducated African American anarchist African Americans logically ignore. (La Shawn Barber, we salute you.) Must radical Black feminists offer more fiction than fact like conservative hitwomen Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter? Real academics raise public debate into human thought's more complex realms, and the radical Black feminist perspective must preserve this vigilance in its interactions with the diverse Black community.

Because when we desire angry Black women, the cultural signposts abound. Hit reality television often centers today around an Omarosa Manigault or a Tiffany Patterson (Flavor of Love's New York), whose obnoxious, angry, egotistical, megalomaniacal personalities forge controversy and resentment from all other people. Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice and media mogul Oprah Winfrey, arguably the two most powerful and influential African American women on planet Earth, exist more as constructed White institutions rather than flesh and blood human beings. Dr. Rice travels the world to broker toothless examples of executive American impotence while Darfur bleeds out and Iraq flatlines. Unmask our brilliant Black American Princess and reveal Sally Hemings' postmodern sophisticate redux, who patiently waits to conform to her ignoble master's latest unendurable request. Oprah's syndicated White feminism casts Ms. Winfrey as America's Mammy without pretense. Instead of passe cocaine rehab, White celebrity today buys an hour on Oprah's couch, so Tom Cruise, Jennifer Anniston, and the Dixie Chicks wax illogical about their overblown media controversies with Mammy Winfrey, everyone's favorite best friend. If Oprah couldn't buy and sell these cream cheese Caucasians, Madonna might've asked her to breastfeed her adopted Malawian baby.

We end where we begin. Hip hop, patently racist, sexist, and homophobic, appeals as rebel music to privileged Americans unwilling to grapple with the personal-as-political costs of true rebellion. However, those who challenge the new world disorder of globalized prejudice must prize substance over style, and survival over semiotics. Jay-Z's scantily-clad video vixens contribute to their own racial and sexual disrespect, but the abysmal rates of sexually transmitted disease transmission in the Black community present the more damaging Black community crisis. Hip hop will hate women tomorrow. Unless radical Black feminists prove willing to interrogate all these concerns with reason and research, they devalue themselves and their perspectives, and resemble all the other useless, shiftless coons with whom they disagree. Sistas with education must exude the rugged individualism to analyze and interpret problems without clouding their judgment with personal bias and hidden agendas; otherwise, every radical Black feminist representative resembles the overweight quadruple-bypass candidate Ms. Peaches, who fries that chicken like the Pied Piper of clogged arteries and unrepentant minstrelsy. You hear me?

Minstrel Music

2006-10-25T00:26:00.000-07:00

This guttural, anguished scream against the obvious minstrelsy of modern rap offers few solutions and scant hope. In fall 2006 an African American advocates lynching to counteract the unceasing coonery of top selling rap artists like the Ying Yang Twins, 50 Cent, and Jim Jones -- no, I can't believe it either. Any person of color who advocates lynching in any form, for any reason, either does not understand the utter inhumanity and soulless depravity of the original American terrorism, or has already become so detached and so desensitized to his own melanin that his perspective exists outside the barest extremities of unreasonable speech. To lynch is to hate with passion, to kill without remorse, to pillage and slaughter and dismember others based on your hatred of their shared intrinsic identity, and to expect general praise and communal accolades from your fellow Americans amid the bloody greenery of your sociopathic escapades. Before online celebrity sex tapes and baseball, lynching was America's number one pastime, a favored activity John Q. Public never truly laid down. Even today, African Americans endure domestic hate crimes in larger number and proportion than any other group -- no African American should, in my opinion, willfully support lynch law, in any sense, period. NYOIL's cynical suggestion posits lynching as conscious African American uplift, and deserves unceasing scorn and consistent derision for such confused racial solidarity.

For those so battered and bruised by persistent anti-Black (yet all-American) racism that their soft ebony skins glisten purple with the agitated sweat of revenge and shake randomly with the nervous tics of vindictiveness, burning down the master's house with his own kerosene may appeal. There's something underdog, subversive, counterculture (and therefore, cool) about the double agent protagonist for the African American urbanite of my generation, bastard children of James Bond and Tony Montana. What is the ubiquitous Black phrase "from corporate to ghetto" if not an open acknowledgement of our silently disarming disingenuousness? We identify with the stealth sniper, the silent killer, because decades of post-Civil Rights Movement social programming convinces the most reasoned and reasonable among us that the sensible next step toward that bright, black utopia called "There" in the Black community involves the forced injection of our best and brightest into all institutions of education, capital, influence, and power in modern American society. Affirmative action, repugnant though it may remain for those privileged Black thinkers who can afford to wax philosophical about the indignities of matriculation and hiring decisions based on factors outside simple merit, continues to command nigh-total support in the Black community because we can never shed our plantation two-face. "We wear the mask that grins and lies," wrote Paul Laurance Dunbar in 1896, and frankly, as NYOIL's boorish consciousness points out, our mascara's running.

It's so utterly repugnant, his video's concept of lynching as community uplift, so unbelievably bad that one must assume the artist himself simply does not recognize the import of his chosen diction, does not understand the unmitigated hell of the lynching. Lynching can not be redeemed or recast to serve the interests of Black people; like the original American hatespeech -- nigger, it will always remain a tool of anti-African American antagonism, beyond misplaced reclamation and earnest colorblind casting. Real anti-racist action innovates; useful pro-Black creativity always offers something new and untried and never before seen. The sit-in, the teach-in, the boycott, the protest march, the prayer meeting, the voter registration drive, the impassioned poetry of radical ideologues and the building takeovers of student status quo antagonists -- all these African American Civil Rights Movement innovations outline the modern social movement playbook every emergent minority group currently utilizes to redefine freedom for their members and force recognition of their specific agendas into our attention deficit disordered pop up populace. Black people wrote the original identity politics playbook. African Americana exudes creative resistance without self-hate; the literary genius of James Baldwin and the moody artistry of Miles Davis, the compelling humanity of Sidney Poitier and the rhetorical supremacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. provide profiles of the exceptional, but not the exception. We are both beautiful and Black; we learned this with bitter tears and inexpressible sacrifice, hanging from the poplar trees of Billie Holiday's America.

The Love Below

2006-06-20T09:40:00.000-07:00

Sunlight bleeds between the bedroom window blinds; Sunday morning blinks into hazy focus. Wine-colored sheets, wrinkled and warm, shamelessly expose illicit elements of my burnt sienna frame. Everything is still. My body contorts around my love, clings without desperation around her voluptuous curves, her sun-kissed flesh. My curious vantage point, momentarily obstructed by her long ebony hair, spies her comfortable, satisfied expression. I shift. She murmurs. The public political combat between Fareed Zakaria and George Will on ABC News' This Week on the possible short-term anti-Latino anti-immigrant legislation for congressional Republicans can wait. The angel beside me presents the only Heaven I'll ever know.

I'm more known for my hate than my love; cast as the irascible iconoclast, my criticism here and elsewhere often meets opposition more emotional than rational. Case in point: Loving Day. I couldn't believe it: a holiday designed to uplift, support, and celebrate the Supreme Court precedent that legalized interracial marriages nationwide, Loving v. Virginia. My instinct lampoons this piss-poor excuse for human mirth and merriment, until I noticed the Washington Post's recent article on the newfound celebration. Then, shock overpowered reason. True, Loving v. Virginia altered society, crushed the artificial prohibitions between heterosexual participation in the institution of marriage in the United States, and expanded everyone's freedom of association. American free choice won it's day in court. Still, a holiday to support this most obvious of political victories appears to my mind, superfluous. Loving Day exposes the triumph of superficial exhilaration over superficial differences, bases the feel-good identity politics of orthodox left-wing multiculturalism over the Homo sapiens necessity to question other people's behavior. We judge lest we be judged alone.

Loving Day asks a modern American population traumatized by stolen elections, incompetent institutions, failing foreign policy and a worthless war President, a population always reluctant to further integrate its disparate sociopolitical demographics (each clamoring with violent desperation for the general public to both understand and fulfill their needs and wants, the national eureka improbable to enact and impossible to force) to revel in the miniscule but growing population segment that makes interracial interaction either a daily choice or a natural occurrence -- the interracial relationships and mixed-race American citizens -- just because basic fairness dictates their existence.

Honestly, anything that further congeals and politicizes the mixed-race community deserves accolades. I'm utterly disgusted with the Tiger Woods effect, where mixed-race Americans find their personal political narratives annexed by politicized monorace minority groups, self-interested and egotistical, who rip and slash and claw each other in order to claim total public rights to various mixed-race celebrities like soulless movie studio executives who hover over disaster victims with promises of lucrative payoffs to soothe the lingering psychosomatic effects of Oceanic Flight 815. Bizarre parallels to ancient one-drop rule discrimination abound, yet African American race imperialism claims such public luminaries as Halle Berry, Dwayne Johnson, Soledad O'Brian and Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL). When Black people deny self-determination to nascent minority groups, we should not allow surprise to mute the needed rebuke; without pulling everyone's ghetto pass, it remains possible to leave the race's crackhead desperation for professionally successful and morally invulnerable role models to Black youth intact and discard the excess pressure every new public figure with partial genetic connection to the African Diaspora must face as a Molotov condition of their genes and their celebrity. While I found the "Cablinasian" designation a clumsy gaffe, I can respect its independent thought and individualist candor. If Loving Day helps forge a new mixed-race political consciousness, a postmodern multidentity politics, then one useful pot of gold may be found at the end of the rainbow.

But I'm neither lucky nor charmed; when Teresa Heinz Kerry self-designates as African American, and Sen. Obama appeals to Democratic audiences of all stripes and ideologies as "the future of the party" without significant Senate accomplishment or outlier policy proscriptions, armed only with biography and charisma, my consistent cynicism realizes that modern American transracialism regards all sociopolitical racial definitions as fluid at best and pixelated usually. In a global village where all melanin is Max Factor, no Sen. Hillary Clinton tribal wisdom will provide cultural context for the mixed-race community, or anyone else. First Twenty-First Century maxim: Define yourself, or die.

Hence my overall gripe with Loving Day -- to present interracial relationships as legalized Jubilee masks today's multifaceted, complex prejudices against and obstacles toward interracial couples, and pretends that all the battles are won and all the wounds healed. Landmark Supreme Court decisions are not musical codas; they crescendo change, raise our discontent decibel until our harmonious discord shatters tradition and deafens discrimination. Our anthems of liberation are as of now unsung. The mainstream cherry-picks lighter and brighter multiracial Americans, that long-legged alabaster human art with high cheekbones, full lips, Nordic noses and anime eyes bred by design for an exotic Vogue photoshoot in midtown Manhattan, to add, quite literally, a dash of color to your favorite Wonderbread sitcom or that rambunctious reality show where the seven strangers on a deserted Indonesian island eat mutated caterpillars and steamed goat testicles while they parachute from their billionaire businessman benefactor's private plane replete with fresh grapes, Cristal, three sensual, half-naked, busty Dominican goddesses named Sophia, Marisol, and Persuajon, and a discredited hip hop mogul signature dancing for spare change, to find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start getting shameless. In the real world, tokenized multiculturalism renders inter-minority coalitions obsolete.

Of course we can't unify: our prejudices and proclivities define our cultural backgrounds, we delineate Self from its distance from the Other. Bias contours, hate borders. The amorphous require the outlines, and refuse the bloody artistry required to draw the identity demarcations themselves. Loving Day asserts the false premise that those political and cultural boundaries that cleave difference to characterize cultures simply don't matter, that the wicked wisdom of Jim Crow and Jim Bean that lynched Emmitt Till and erased Rosewood, Florida no longer makes residence in the hearts and minds of John and Jane Q. Public. The Loving Day website that organizes community barbeques and support parties for interracial couples and mixed race progeny boasts several Hallmark testimonials from persons quick to share stories of personal enrichment through interracial copulation, people who believe they literally fuck away their forefathers' bigotry. Reality bites. One can't discuss Loving Day realistically without a clinical recall of the reasoning behind anti-miscegenation laws in the United States: foreign control of Black male sexuality by the American ruling class, White slaveowners and displaced serfs alike. Remember. Recall the iron chains, evoke the bloodied whips; smell with historical olfaction the dank, diseased cargo holds heavy with sweaty, musty, moldy funk. Vomit. Block away the cries of the dying and the damned. Ignore the torn flesh. Disregard the infected sores. Ride the relentless waves, swallow your gnawing hunger. Remember revenge. Survive.

American chattel slavery conceptualized the African American man as sexual dynamo to prevent the mixed-race offspring from White mothers and slave sperm donors to gain legal parity with full European settlers. However, in today's hypertext hybridism, where identity manifests more malleable than high-definition bitmap images, an intra-racial insurgency challenges White Anglo-Saxon Protestant control over Black male sexual identity and free choice, and emerges from the formerly downtrodden and dispossessed Black woman. Reborn as college-educated, determined professional extraordinaire from rambunctious around-the-way girl clad in tight, low-cut DKNY spaghetti-tees, battered Boss blue jeans and black leather jackets, Mary J now considers a fundamental element of the good life the personal creation of a meaningful, committed, and loving marriage to a professional yet moral Black man, that produces respectful, educated Black progeny, with all the associated joy and struggle and camaraderie expected. Her sister Omarosa chafes; the masculine myths about their brothers inflate both their market share and their massive egos, and reduce formerly decent, hardworking, innocent young Black boys into low-budget Kanye Wests' with so much superheated helium under their wooly cornrowed craniums that even their conflict diamond encrusted Jesus Pieces and platinum grills from Jacob the Jeweler and Paul Wall won't impede their arrogant anti-gravity. Drive slow, watch these eligible Black men sell stereotyped sex to the highest bidder, notice new-age minstrels who capitalize from buffoonery and racial blasphemy. Please do not judge; if your home was where the hatred is, you wouldn't wait to touch the sky either. No matter; the college dropout welcomes Pamela Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith with open Schwarzenegger arms and black Trojan Magnum boxes. His latex gold crinkles with eager anticipation as these gregarious Girls Gone Wild discard the white cotton and inhale the white powder, willing to provide ecstasy hopped up on ecstasy. So what if this tan Talented Tenth misses a lecture on post-Civil Rights Movement cultural nationalism in African American Political Thought with Imam Amiri Baraka at eight-thirty A.M. in Cornell University's Goldwin Smith Hall; these buxom blonds blow bomb cock! I'm sorry, Ms. Jackson; it's a seller's auction block you can't afford.

Don't ask why. Black male sexuality remains inherently pornographic. Whether immortalized in still photography by National Geographic or Hustler, Americans reflect on the Black male's on-demand sexuality as gaudy and racist and indecent, crafted to provide sensory pleasure for their private enjoyment. Brothers plunge and strain and ejaculate their sour spunk into randy receptacles, entertain the masses with money shots and anatomical excess. Again we copulate without control. One can rewind and play our astounding intercourse at one's whim, marvel without sensitivity at our demonic stamina, our unconscious reverberations. We cannot love, only lust: the African Adonis, an anatomically correct automaton who sweats and grinds and strokes for your benefit, blessed with bodies black and brutal and true, boasts defined obsidian musculature devoid of grey matter. Mechanical animals who rut via remote, Black men often confront Black women whose fervent antagonism towards interracial relationships distills into an elegant ebony hand frosted with sensual fire-truck red nails that reaches for the bitter chastening rod James Weldon Johnson warned about; the Sony soul-controller of Black sexual choice caught between the playful mock conflict of a new-age Thomas and Sally, lightly misted with tropical sweat, pungent with post-coital pheromones, who battle with half-committed insolence over definitive controlling influence over Black male sexuality after long, torrid bouts of raw, unencumbered, unprotected lovemaking so spontaneous neither partner can be sure where consent ends and coercion begins. Resist anachronism; don't call it something new.

We end at the beginning. All interracial relationships expose the best and worst about the human condition amid Western civilization: we never learn to accept difference, no matter how intimate, no matter how beautiful. Our mundane humanity absorbs daily sacrifices and quiet indignities that deny culture and burn identity; interracial love only exacerbates such stress. Any assumption that interracial relationships erase racism prove incorrect; if anything, the emotional proximity affords new reasons to hate. Furthermore, all interracial relationship participants fall prey to the bizarre exoticism that fetishizes racial difference in the West; stereotypes that characterize people as submissive or bestial or spicy or aggressive exist regardless of the scented candles that surround your bubble bath, the aromatherapy wafting past your wet brown nostrils, the dexterous, slow, meticulous massage your dutiful boyfriend applies after his careful washing of your worn, soft flesh and your most mysterious arenas following that laborious laboratory day of endless PCR tests and repetitive DNA retrieval. Your love does not matter to another's hate; you forget this at your peril alone. Remember, all the controversy that surrounds interracial relationships emerges from those outside those struggles who believe they stand to lose from these natural realignments in the natural order. The model minorities massacre all those who defend the Asian American female's right to free association because their misogyny assumes that negative media input deconstructs all Asian American men from the brave and the bold to Long Duk Dong and William Hung, comical Asian masculinity misrepresentations whose suggestive monikers reinforce the stereotypical Asian male lack, not possible phallic overconfidence. Angry Black women exhale their frustrations over jungle fever without considering that some Black men simply do not care about Black women, period. (Not that hip hop is any indication, of course.) Sure, Black male progressivism may combat sexism and misogyny both in the workplace and in the community, in the club with 50 Cent and in the church with T.D. Jakes, but that's a holistic, macro-level project for these brothers, not concerned with dissecting women into arbitrary groups. The point is to live and learn from others' hate, not to ignore vitriol with immature blinders to continue childish ignorance. Interracial interaction is a political act, subject to all manner of reasoned discourse and unflattering criticism; Loving Day wishes people would practice libertarian laissez-faire politics, deny all responsibilities the individual owes the general population outside of physical and economic safety, and just live and love with barbeque sauce and George Foreman grills and fifth-grade remembrances of those who fought to marry under God and country before it was popular. I disagree. We can develop the love below without the offer of the mind above as sacrifice.

If we really love one another, we do not have a choice.

Related:
Loving Day & Loving Day, Part 2 by Reappropriate.com
Village Voice Interview with Ken Tanabe
Mrs. Williams on Loving Day
Happy (post-)Loving Day! from A Tangled Web
Loving Day Recalls a Time When the Union of a Man And a Woman Was Banned from ActingWhite.com
...a job a million girls would die for. from WilliamBruceWest.com
Interracial Relationships And Marriage: Ironies from Booker Rising

The Nigger Syndrome

2006-02-05T22:10:00.000-08:00

I'd forgotten what it was like to feel attractive. Without foolish false modesty, or Kanye West compliment gropes, somewhere after my Prince Charming first contact amid a University dance studio, I relinquished all sense of personal sexiness, all concepts of individual desirability to a dimly recalled fantasy state, past-perfect, ethereal, cloudy, an odd flash of memory already faded, yellow, dim, gone. I know why. To be devoted to real love requires total concentration, complete selflessness; you need to give as instinct all of yourself to another, faster than reflex. And I am in love in an imperfect world, where my relationship, along with my integrity, tolerance, and sanity are under constant attack.

And I am a Black man.

Within the first three months of my connection with Angel, I learned that I would never be good enough for her, according to the world around us. African American/ Asian American pairings were never common at Cornell, or anywhere else, and everyone regarded us as an oddity, a carnival sideshow, an interracial Bobby and Whitney without the substance abuse to explain our impossible union. We were never meant to last, according to the prevailing wisdom, what 'they' say, or any Delphic oracle your modern world wishes to consult. Mike Lowry, voice cracked with grave concern years later, once told me that the two of us were supposed to meet, hook up for a while, have innocent, wondrous sex, and break up before life got complicated. How could we coexist, an angel and a demon, a princess and a pauper, Beauty and the Beast? Wear rose-colored Lens Crafters; from the outside, gaze upon your perversion of our scene. Watch Angel swoon under primitive, predatory pheromones, surrender her nubile body, her agile mind, her unblemished spirit, to the criminal Cro-Magnon clad in midnight leather and grim, black combat boots, a real life Vandal Savage. From your tyrannical third-person vantage point, omnipotent and cruel, as far removed from reality as taxation without representation, stare as the petite Chinese daughter, pristine, innocent, pure, tragically serves an indefinite term of indentured sexual servitude, brutal, bloody, alone, shanghaied by the maniacal Melanin Manson, the latest receptacle of a demented psyche's antisocial fun. Rip her silk blouse, snatch the jade pendant. Bruised butterscotch breasts betray debauchery through submission, reveal sadism and suffering and sadness. Hear shrill screams. Close wet eyes. Irradiated by unrefined, unrestrained, unconscionable, unforgivable Blackness, the kidnapped, stolen, helpless Angel struggles against an unbreakable mental sorcery designed to undercut her common sense, your common protest -- the only future I can possibly provide involves poverty, pain, and early death. Social ostracism, financial meltdown, cynical victimhood transfer from my genes and my words, taint all I contact with ruin and disrepair and hate, a reverse King Midas iced out in conflict diamond-encrusted spinning G-Unit bling specially ordered from Jacob the Jeweler. I am a Black man. All my love hurts.

Human hydrochloric acid, the Modern American Black Man represents Death. His corrosive disposition towards his country, his community, his culture, his own people, unravels the worn and scorched Stainless Banner Betsy Ross sowed. No, that's not a typographical error; whether thirteen stars or fifty, for many Black Americans the Stars and Stripes and the Southern Cross interchange easily. Ask Mississippi's David Banner for natural disaster details. The Modern American Black Man murders; syncopated Smith and Wesson snare drums and high velocity hot lead hi-hats deliver hardcore street backbeats for disaffected American cherubs thirsty for casual homophobia and commonplace misogyny, shaken, not stirred, with a crunk juice chaser. Uncle Sam's deserved curse resides within Uncle Tom's Cabin; the modern American Black man shoots his fellow man for pocket change after he jacks his fellow man for pocket crack. Yes, it's 2006, and we'll still rob you in Compton and blast you in Miami. The Modern American Black Man respects power through violence, because power through violence remains the base method his country, his community, his culture and his own people choose, with every police harassment first encounter and unlawful drug search and warrantless wiretap and faux speeding detention and mistreated emergency medicine gunshot wound treatment and outsourced manufacturing job and student loan interest rate increase and Hollywood pimp glorification and bombastic Establishment-authorized Black civil rights demagogue and state sponsored, ratings approved syndicated reality television show, where ebony males flee through boarded, dilapidated federal housing projects with speed and fear and failure to escape burly, mustachioed over-forty municipal super-soldiers with thick, red-haired forearms, bloody black steel nightsticks, barking Glock nine millimeters, and single-minded determination to serve the public trust and protect the innocent with feigned amnesia coupled with Sean Penn charisma towards any pesky American Civil Liberties Union-patrolled law that impedes their righteous vengeance and furious anger -- this is what Americans choose to eliminate their nigger problem. Beat Black bodies. Rip Black flesh. Break Black bones. Protect us, Officer Volpe. Broomsticks not included.

Real life does not include a user's manual; no Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth achieve necessary relevance in modern African American life, regardless of lapsed Wu Tang affiliate Killer Priest's impressively innovative poetic license to kill microphones or later-day Black Buddha Bishop T.D. Jakes' excessively egotistical media presence. The sad truth is that most people, especially African Americans, require a guiding mental principle, a personal grand unified theory to productively interact with American life given its damaging contradictions. Whether consciously aware of these prevailing themes, most people need a standard, a rock, the ability to judge and be judged by something rational and logical and honest and sensible. Whether popular morality or organized religion or personal spirituality garnered from intense individual reflection and contemplation, most people need to believe in something. Given this, the Modern American Black Man's easy distrust toward justice, open antagonism toward order, plain hatred of peace strikes a mortal wound within our horrified body politic. Unchecked, the Modern American Black Man infects Lady Liberty with acquired innocence deficiency syndrome, atrophies our gallant George Washington greatness, neuters nobility bought with industry and conviction and sacrifice in conflicts foreign and domestic. Ironically, some insist there's no connection with the rampant social construction of the Black man as serial rapist, perverse and frantic, obsessed with Missy Anne's hairless, moist, pale, pink vulviform, lightly dusted with Johnson's Baby Powder, and the sociopolitical rape liberal Black men force upon mainstream American political thought, with dry phallic thrusts of radical speech and non-lubricated black leather revolutionary fisting; the Issac Hayes produced soundtrack meticulously blends the choked sobs of widowed Black schoolteachers for absent human freedom and the twisted grimaces of incarcerated Black scarfaces at unnecessary inhuman injustice. The vilified Kanye West, inarticulate and unintelligent with clashing baby blue Ralph Lauren dress shirt and nuclear holocaust yellow orange Akademics sweater provides the perfect sleeper candidate for nationally broadcast Black rage over the Hurricane Katrina debacle; Rolling Stone offers his next assignment as your next Jesus of Nazareth. African American opportunism need not lead America to ignore serious public policy problems within Black America, but remember, the prevailing wisdom characterizes Black masculinity, regardless of form or shape, as Death. No one goes out of his way to help the Grim Reaper with his homework.

It must be understood: for years, I considered myself repulsive, sickening, ugly. Ugly, by design; ugly, without end; ugly without the possibility of parole. To live as a person or color in the United States of America one must contend with omnipresent standards of beauty believed natural by their palefaced beneficiaries and thought desirable by all audiences, target and otherwise. Everyone absorbs relatively similar media input, including but not limited to the negative, divisive social programming that justifies rampant inequality, generational poverty, conspicuous consumption and hate. I am a Black man, in America: if I didn't hate myself I'd be insane. What I did not consider before was that self-hate occurs without explicit or conscious reflection most of the time. Internalized revulsion for one's basic identity can be more damaging than the critical eye most people use to gaze the mirror image, the self within. One of my most vivid childhood remembrances involves sitting on the large bed in my parents' room somewhere around age seven, eyes bright and brown and tortured and bloodshot, a bawling victim of some forgotten racial slight this inconsequential child could neither combat nor defend against. Perhaps some White teacher refused my rightful grades to promote her White students, or some fellow White classmate spat some racial slur at me he learned at home; I know those incidents happened later. What I'm certain of, is that whatever the conflict, it was racial, because I never forgot the question I asked my patient, saintly mother. Mommy, what's so good about being Black? Taken aback, she detonates, livid with pro-Black indignation toward her wayward charge, warns against the inferiority cumulonimbus she spies within my internal atmosphere. Sorry Dr. King, but Funtown is still closed to colored children.

Twenty-four years into this chaotic sensory input overload called real life, I realize our collective central nervous system transmits malicious software to all plugged into wesciv.net, the Western Civilization network, and this self-replicating stereotype shareware sickens the concentrated melanin masses to benefit their lighter counterparts. Notice the genius present -- past anonymity, beyond witness protection, no one, living, dead, or persistent vegetative state, is to blame for the Category Five catastrophe caused to patients infected by modern racism's network borne viruses, whether physical, political, or financial. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can not exist for the sick and the dying, the venal and the insane. No purple lesions, no persistent cough, no discoloration of the urine or feces whispers this condition, speaks my sickness. I have that Nigger Syndrome. Pray its in remission.

In layman's terms, the Nigger Syndrome results when a Black man (or anyone, really) internalizes the demeaning public prejudices our world broadcasts about him and everyone like him, when he believes with religious certainty the disgusting bigotry and debased hate our irrational human condition manifests for another's profit. No matter how extreme innovation and independence diversify modern media, most Americans expose themselves to a narrow oligarchy of irresponsible, materialist, anti-intellectual, social Darwinist, misogynist, anti-minority synchronizing socialization cast as reputable, reasonable mainstream media input. My fellow Americans, speech is not free, thought is neither independent nor critical, and just because the United States Constitution illegalized the Transatlantic Slave Trade in 1807 and domestic American chattel slavery in 1865 does not mean you don't invest in human capital. Frankly, with increased economic specialization into varied, fast proliferating, insular micro-sectors in our professional classes, supported by the modern corporate university's capitalist-driven endowment competition complex, the United States relies with exponential necessity upon general media input to corral the American body politic into a traditional sociopolitical order recognized by America's middle class and manipulated by America's elites -- no small task for Brian Williams at NBC Nightly News and Steven Spielberg's last big-budget Tom Cruise blockbuster and Steve Jobs' I-pod digital music revolution. Racism works, let's face it; to manifest and distribute the impossible nationalism required to unify three hundred million plus American citizens, some illiterate, some multilingual, some apathetic, some reactionary, some pious, some heretical, our mass media, our collective central nervous system, utilizes prejudice. And it works. The paltry tribalism that abounds on segregated prime-time television and the opinion-editorial pages of our newspapers of record only serve to color the planetary environment into uncomplicated Crayola pastels, devoid of all specificity or complication or passion. We no longer only watch the flickering letterbox full of Must-See situation comedies, we live them; reality television typecasts imitation life in the latest buffoon burlesque of the human experience, concocts inhuman automatons like Omarosa Manigault Stallworth, sparks a laugh track among real people in real places. Today, everyone's scripted.

Perhaps that's the reason Melanin Manson exists, perhaps the end result of an abbreviated lifetime of racist slights and racist moments, of racist liberal pity and racist conservative vitriol, of racist little children who openly compare my slim six foot one African American frame, with burnt sienna skin and hair of lamb's wool, to prehistoric hunter gatherers waxed from antiquity in a constructed African savanna on a floor of New York City's Natural History Museum, of racist parental units who propose sibling celibacy when language differences mistranslate their apocalyptic nightmare pornography fears involving their adult daughter's nighttime festivities, of countless racist first contact situations amid Clorox seas of cellophane people within my age demographic where the Abercrombie first distrust the Negro they don't know, then smile nervously at the unknown entity's risque humor, and then laugh uncontrollably at every comment or sound said Negro emits, regardless of humor or logic, even if he's simply asking for directions to the nearest bathroom! -- perhaps the checkmate, the endgame, the climax of our ongoing Maybelline minority morality play involves living with a disease instead of killing what ails. We manage symptoms while the real cancer multiplies unopposed, embrace quality of life rather than real living. Do you know the link between Michael Jackson and Robert Kelly, between Tupac Shakur and John Allen Muhammad? At some point in their lives, someone treated them like a nigger, and they believed that treatment was just. So in a world where they drink pain for crimes of birth they can't change, odd life choices, open perversion, self-destructive thug nationalism and psychotic domestic terrorism display respective variance in the Modern American Black Man's coping mechanisms. My suggestion? End the therapy; begin the healing.

I am a Black man. There are no niggers here.

The Ghetto

2005-12-01T02:10:00.000-08:00

I hate the Ghetto.

I always have. Coming home, I mutated into a six foot one inch Whitley Gilbert, so snobbish and judgmental that I want the entire Black community of Portsmouth, Virginia placed under strict quarantine. I realize many of you immediately channel Michael Eric Dyson at these words of frustration, but the nappy dreadlocks and barely glued tracks and plastic nails and unkempt beards and sagging pants and booty shorts and coarse language and unplanned pregnancies and gaudy makeup and narcotics sales and firearm violence and police brutality and general apathy overwhelms even the most compassionate conservatives among us. And believe me, my friends, I am liberal. I will not absorb the soft bigotry of low expectations concerning my racial brethren's unresolved socioeconomic plight.

I reject elitism, discard optimism. We free thinking African Americans must apply both our logic and our solidarity toward our sisters and brothers who work and play in local low-budget strip clubs, where the scantily-clad sex workers display stretch marks and cigarette burns along with their sienna pancake nipples and landing strip pubes. Dear Precious, the auburn-skinned temptress voluptuous with double E-cup breasts and a butterscotch behind so fat even Cherokee fears her pornography assets require upgrade, eagerly requests seventy dollars from your best friend for her thirty-five minute lap dance, where you are unsure who molested who yet utterly convinced no one will face prosecution, and informs you she's studying for her Masters Degree in Accounting at respected Old Dominion University. You want to praise her determination; yet can't believe her upwardly mobile pronouncement. Besides, your dark brown eyes struggle to focus on her light-gray contact lenses, hope to avoid her haphazardly re-applied showgirl G-string, left-of-center, tossed on too tightly, revealing most of her shaven womanly cleft. Topless and talkative, energetic and erotic, Precious flashes her winning worker's smile; sound escapes your notice. A strong shoulder slap from your friend shatters your reverie. Precious offers her talents to your horny human form. You don't like strip clubs. You don't respect ghetto strippers, forced by inner-city economics to secure enough Federal Reserve Notes by any means necessary to provide Similiac and Pampers and cable television to the youthful progeny they shouldn't produce. You dislike the primitive, new-age Neanderthal sexuality that your race-gender-age demographic displays without moral confusion or public inhibition. You realize that only your infinite capacity for hate prevents you from taking Precious' offer. Not your infinite love for your life partner, not your human fear of sexually transmitted disease contraction, not your financial straits. You haven't seen your Angel in a month, and your heart, mind, and body miss her. You have no serious belief that you can contract an STD from a simple gyrating posterior upon your Dockers-covered khaki crotch. Your best friend will cover any payment you can't make. You leave the club.

The Ghetto deserves criticism as long as the Ghetto saps my very soul. Temptation is not an island, it's oxygen. We require both to survive and feel human. The Ghetto however, degrades human interaction with its constant, chosen civic flirtation with poverty-line pop culture. Small business entrepreneurship, the backbone of upward mobility for ethnic and political minorities since Thucydidies, should be supported by all Americans, but I cannot ignore that Ms. Trang's nail shops and Ivan Draco's Guns & Ammo drains purchasing power from the African American community. We spend outside ourselves and later wonder at our own poverty. Further, human creativity, silenced through hip-hop commercialism, atrophies amid the unceasing reverberation of trap rhetoric and dope boy imagery. In high school, I befriended drug dealers and drug users, knew teenage mothers and incarcerated students. Cornell presented memory soma; my absence made my heart grow colder. Forgetfulness is bliss, exile divine. Today, the stark street-level reality of life in economically downtrodden Black Suburbia impedes any and all Mother Teresa compassion for the Coon Calcutta that surrounds my parents' home. Unless one works at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, or stays the course in Iraq for George W. Bush, petty criminality emerges as one's vocation of choice. All those hoop dreams and hood tournaments amount to less than the broken asphalt that housed them once your second child in two years is born and your hours have been cut back at the Gwaltney meatpacking plant. The Ghetto we all know and some love promotes death to Black America; funerals for the barely alive and sadly immature dot the gray urban landscape, populated by a middle-aged and steadily graying integrated African American professional ruling class, self-centered Christian capitalist, who attend the morning services of their children with dripping tears and loud lamentations. Choked sermons and punctuated eulogies ring horror and sadness and death over bountiful bouquets of family flower arrangements, fuchsia and lavender and rouge and white, while humbled homies wait in the surreal cathedral to say a final Boyz II Men goodbye to a fallen comrade they've already avenged with the heatseeking hollow-point homicide of another young Black man. It's 2005; Young Jeezy is more culturally relevant than Rosa Parks, no matter what Oprah says.

Yes, I'm Whitley, petty bourgeoisie, and I deride the Ghetto. I'm no better than these people; I'm not superior to these people, but I do not respect these people. Life is not an ongoing episode of BET Uncut. Ali and Big Gipp will not provide country narration amid natural Negro teats and ashy Black knees while the shaky Handicam nine millimeter manned by Lil' Pookie at Freaknik treats your optic nerves to ever-bouncing, always shaking bare Black asses and overweight, potbellied Black men with flashy, jewel-encrusted cups and shiny, jewel-encrusted teeth who treat their expensive custom cars and Jacob the Jeweler medallions and Pitbull Kennels canines better than they treat Black women. In every Disco Inferno, the Black woman burns at the stake. No one forces a tip drill to take an African American Express up the ass, but remember that Ghetto Approval requires inhuman commodification. Respect, or love, or compassion for the Ghetto requires a level of intellectual clemency I refuse the political felons within my community. Black anti-feminism, Black homophobia, Black racism, Black anti-intellectualism, and Black poverty emerge from and are produced by the Ghetto to some definable capacity, and now that it's once again a living, breathing social antagonist in my life, my hatred knows no bounds. The neo-Talented Tenth reject the Africana Studies plea to return to the universal 'hood to assist those we leave behind for exactly this reason: We hated the Ghetto just as much as the Ghetto hated us before we left, and we do not belong if ever we return. On the bitterly cold streets of Portsmouth, where street prostitutes and street pharmaceuticalists exchange monies before dawn to provide momentary sensory overload to the American proletariat, I walk among the damned, exiled by education, ostracized by originality, the displaced collegian touring urban blighted alleyways and substance abused addicts in a personal fact-finding mission like Rep. John Murtha on the gritty streets of Baghdad. It's a different world, the one I ran from.

Back on the Block

2005-11-16T15:30:00.000-08:00

I've missed my blog.

I thank everyone who is still reading this site; I understand that my post absence has not helped. My short, quick, Portsmouth, Virginia public library PG-13 explanation? My parents are sick. I flew home two weeks ago to find my father suffering from complications of triple-bypass heart surgery and my mother hospitalized from a shattered knee. I spent four days last week where the only people I spoke to face to face were confined to hospital beds, with various medical technologies and tubes hooked up to their aged flesh. Sirens wail, numbers flash, and electronic signals constantly monitor the utter frailty of human life.

It was my executive decision to return home. My sisters are busy with their own lives, as they should be. My younger sister assisted my parents when my father had the major surgery, and my older sister has been helping out the family since time immemorial. I chose to assist now. I was not prepared in any sense for the ramifications of that decision.

I hate Virginia. I've always considered myself from the Old Dominion, but not of the Old Dominion. In the past six years since I started college, every weekend or short visit to my hometown bleeds difficulty and heartache, shattered friendships and omnipresent ostracism. Virginia is my own personal hell. I'm enveloped, saturated, drowning in the guttural, gun-barrel, ghetto mentality of every Southernplayalisticadillac wannabe musician and each curvy, busty, voluptuous, bottle-blond, sedentary, collard green, fatback, cornbread-fed big booty Brenda with three children under age five, freshly manicured nails from Ms. Trang's and more fake hair than the floor of the Waldorf-Astoria penthouse suite during eleven A.M. checkout when Shawn Carter awakes Ms. Knowles with a sweet shoulder kiss after a rambunctious night of passionate, athletic, fresh-to-def lovemaking.

Yes, my friends, the Roc is in the building: the crack rock responsible for the walking dead who appear on my parent's suburban streets at three in the morning as I return from Virginia Beach clubs, the diamond rock reducing all my demographic to materialistic, petty bourgeoisie, desperate for the recording contract or the lottery winnings that will transform their minimum wage weekdays and marijuana haze, strip club weekends into a permanent Young Jeezy video, replete with butter pecan Ricans half-naked, feeding grapes on command and dark-skinned apartheid refugees nasally singing their nursery rhyme hooks. Hell, that's probably attributing too much to the C-student Black P-Town multitude - since youth imagination was the first casualty of war in urban Reaganomics' Iran-Contra, since community pillars leave ethnic enclaves as integration benefits the educated, since no one in my hometown really cares if Tim Kaine beat Jerry Kilgore with a wink and a nod from Governor Mark Warner (D-VA), let's be honest. All we want today is Laffy Taffy.

D4L, with the new album Down For Life, detonated the urban music scene with their annoying, distasteful, anti-intellectual, and downright ignorant improvised explosive debut Laffy Taffy. Ladies and gentlemen, coonery has been digitized for your i-Pod enjoyment. Down here, that simple synthesized bassline pops on, and within the first three notes the dance floors are filled with the bouncing breasts and popping posteriors of every sista in the club, dancing with reckless abandon the syncopated simpleton shake of absentee Negro respect. I'd love to find some redeemable creative quality to this excuse for popular music, but I can't. I hit the wall, stand motionless, and wait for the new Three Six Mafia hit to come on. To be real, I'd love to love my people, but I hate to watch my people hate themselves. But no one cares; everyone's too busy. My people get rich or die tryin', and the morgues always have more room. I've seen the hospital beds we leave behind.

Desperate Housewives

2005-09-30T21:05:00.000-07:00

Slut. Whore. Pussy. Bitch.

American society hates women without end. Our very language reverberates with misogynist nomenclature. We manufacture mascara, inject collagen, implant silicone. Even our celebrities reflect our anti-woman wrath; pop culture jargon codes feminine skepticism and masculine enmity in celebrity proper nouns. Just hearing the name Lil' Kim conjures a gaudy Black Barbie, posable and disposable, discarded behind prison walls like a chocolate covered mini Mattel mannequin outgrown by today's youth. Martha Stewart manifests for your mind's eye a tyrannical iron maiden, her pale, wrinkled face a bizarre tragicomedy mask, porcelain, frozen, inscrutable, a psychotic symphony of corporate marketing genius and matronly domestic virtue. The dainty socialite Paris Hilton presents idle privilege's poster child, America's number one party chick, a boisterous bukkake bulimic with more money than God and about as many scandals worldwide.

Cindy Sheehan symbolizes both modern woman's maternal rage and Victorian woman's eternal frailty. With every protest, every speech, every televised tear shed and every sound-bitten question asked, Mrs. Sheehan discards independence for visibility, sheds autonomy for popularity - according to the fair and balanced conservative character assassination machine that discredits her daily. Many liberals who share her aims and decry her tactics share in the "Sheehan as anti-war movement pawn" dogma; they envision the middle-aged grieving mother as too emotional, too biased, and too meaningless to offer useful perspectives on American foreign policy. To protest is to hate American fighting men, so these detractors believe, and of course, men matter more in modern America. Incidentally, this is the reason the very concept of sexually integrated military forces jar the national psyche; so accustomed are we with the mental picture of the synchronized, efficient, unstoppable United States Armed Forces - replete with good-natured twenty-something Teutonic Easy Company squarejaws, awash with towheaded, azure-eyed Steve Rogers superpatriots from the last simple, good v. evil American military conflict, World War Two - that G.I. Jane fries our fragile synapses. Ben Affleck channels the Greatest Generation's triumph; Kate Beckinsale's only there to give Benji someone to do. Women in combat confuse and scare our basic sexual precepts past usefulness. Hard, simple, exact, distinct sexual roles for men and women calm the American public, because then we don't have to think. We just react, strut, act, creep in this petty pace from day to day. But in the last syllable of recorded time our outdated misogyny may deconstruct, and these traditional ideologies and longstanding beliefs will klaxon gender heresy; the current national schism over the eternal role of women in American society might soon cease with a coronation, not a cataclysm, an inauguration, not a revolution. She's the woman you love to hate, so say it once, with feeling: "Mr. Speaker, The President of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton!"

To love themselves, women the world over developed feminism, "a diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies, largely motivated by or concerning the experiences of women, especially in terms of their social, political, and economic situation", according to trusty Wikipedia. Feminism challenges our old-school sex prejudice, secures gender equality while promoting women's rights. Diversity, equality, democracy - our global capitalist revolution requires cold, corporate calculation, unencumbered by the irrational prejudices that undervalue the labor and ignore the inventiveness of half the human population. Feminism is necessary. And with every online discussion and blog comment I make, I declare myself feminism's enemy. I am the villain of the piece.

Enter Iago. Recently, I've noticed a trend in my online blog comments - I'm never feminist enough. More than the lack of a uterus or mammary glands or long hair, I appear antagonistic to the concerns and perspectives of feminist writers I converse with, like an internet Ishmael Reed without the book deal or the academic infamy. Case in point: the minor brouhaha over Angel's recent masterpiece, Baby Wars. Read the concise, effective prose and the comments, and you notice one repeated and disheartening feminist flaw - how easy it is to attack and discredit other feminists. As soon as Mother Superior DruBlood invaded with her matronly black robes and her unbreakable yardstick of procreative feminist discipline, it was Shirley Chisholm v. N.O.W. all over again. Drublood's anger, palpable and sarcastic and mean, hemorrhaged through the computer screen like a saturated Tampax, and nearly poisoned an incredible discussion on parental rights v. public decorum with irrational mommy toxic shock syndrome. Cheap shot? Yea, probably, but I was far from the only person who disagreed with DruBlood's stereotypically premenstrual sarcasm and vitriol during the exchange. Other bloggers spoke on the parents v. non-parents clash sparked by Reappropriate.com; Tekanji, longtime blogger at Shrub.com, gave her twenty cents in a powerful common ground defense of personal choice feminism, while Cheshire (Nykol) over at Marginal Notations waxed philosophical about Marxist theory's defense of public motherhood. Still, Drublood, La Femme Nikita of the La Leche League, penned the harshest criticism of Baby Wars. There's more Amazon animosity here, here, here, and here. Like Paul Wall, Angel's got the internet going nuts.

I drove slow, homey. My best netiquette, my most easygoing prose, and I'm still the sexist pig, the misogynistic bastard, the patriarchy's Colin Powell, made for television Technicolor wearing my richest sienna Stepin Fetchit Max Factor, preaching false truths on military intelligence for patriotism, posterity, and Halliburton profit. Even in drag, we coon so crackers don't have to. Throughout this weekend's debates - parental control of unruly children in public settings v. non-parent arrogance and intolerance towards families, pro/con public breastfeeding, possible sexist and classist oppression of mothers and children by the patriarchy, cultural preferences toward childbirth as sole path to life-fulfillment, etc. - no matter my personal support of and belief in gender equality and sexual social justice, I was always the oppressor, the woman-hater, Mister Charlie. Why? I'm the anti-O.J., the bizarro Kobe. I don't respect White women.

Today, I live and breathe amongst White women I despise; every passing day another lesson in impossible tolerance for those who benefit as they complain, who win as I lose. It's my most irrepressible racial prejudice - I can't stand White women. My job interviews would often fail when my Meryl Streep interlocutor instigates interrogation; and any overview of my online feminism struggles must grapple with this lifelong impropriety. I know where it starts - respect. Sexual politics belie racial conflicts, and I have the hardest time shaking the idea that your average college-educated, professional White woman respects Black men. Why would they? - we beat out wives, infect our girlfriends, rape our daughters, and call all bitches and 'ho's. Black men aren't just sexist - we're the sexists all men wish they were. Our audiovisual phantasmagorias, broadcast on cable staples MusicTelevision and Black Entertainment Television, offer the entire globe the syncopated blueprint on big pimping girls, girls, girls, half-naked, oiled, easy, with eyes big as saucers and the best breasts money can buy. At any hour of the day in mainstream America, you can turn on a television and immerse yourself in African American sexual terrorism, prepackaged and commodified, Videos Ready to Arouse (VRA's) from perverse private sector emergency marketing companies like Interscope and Island Def Jam. Consider the testosterone fervor of Curtis Jackson, a.k.a 50 Cent. If one believes the incessantly repeated video imagery of rap music's number one corporate superstar, Jackson wakes up every day surrounded by alluring video hoe hedonism. Women of all backgrounds, all races, all classes, envision him as the hardest, Blackest sexual dynamo rap's offered since LL Cool J, and if you listen to his lyrics, women believe the truth. The downside? No matter how socially conscious, White women see a little 50 Cent in all brothers, sometimes a nickel, sometimes a quarter, sometimes the full Kennedy. And every dimepiece around wants to make change.

Black men never leave the auction block. If you believe the published laments and spoken fears of professional, college-educated African American women and their White male counterparts, Black men, following either centuries of race-sex-class oppression in the White supremacist, patriarchal Victorian West or their innate animal lusts, desire White women above all other sexual concerns. The highest example of female beauty for a Black man in this stereotype is a White woman, and all Black men who can afford Missy Anne's cream cheese daughters in our liberal-capitalist present-day endure strong sociocultural urges to taste the other White meat. This racist Negro caricature enjoys such widespread refrain that women of color often adopt elements of Nicole Kidman Whiteness - processed long straight hair (sometimes blond), lighter skin, blue, green, or hazel contacts, eating disorders, weight loss, political apathy, etc. - to Stepford themselves into corporate mainstream perversions of their natural ethnic womanhood to attract the opposite sex within their own races. The oddly standardized Bratz offer comedic animation of this 'neo-whiteface for sexual competition' phenomenon; every low-budget, trailer-trash Million Dollar Baby in the country offers sexual attraction to a higher degree than a woman of color, especially a Black woman, to hear some sistas tell the tale. Whether or not you buy this Terry McMillan argument, realize the dilemma: Black women brighten and lighten and Whiten to attract Black men. Affluent, wealthy, professional Black men, who benefit and suffer from centuries of racist White fears of sexual potency and orgasmic promise, may choose with crass impunity what degree of White femininity and Black social ostracism they are willing to accept; in college, the most depressing example of cynical Black male interracial dating was the brother who spoke of dating Latina women to secure "all the sista's booty, none of her looks". No matter how disgusting his perspective, the sexual economics of Cornell's social scene supported his misogyny. Non-Black women, searching for cheap thrills and cheaper dick, screwed brothers without dating them, fucked brothers without knowing them. It was all about Benjamin, baby, and no matter what trust-fund, private school, Jack & Jill Black aristocracy spawned him, the cornrowed, Ivy League campus gangstas I knew ignored racist denigration for sexual gratification, and loved every hot, slimy, sweaty second.

The sad thing was that we all looked alike. Black Cornell, obsidian mirror of every recent survey of higher education's racial politics, offered a drastically woman-heavy environment; I heard once that Black women outnumbered Black men there at a ratio of six to one. Couple this with the aforementioned fanatic demand for African American Express throughout the female population at the nation's largest Ivy League University, and even the most socially inept, flustered, unattractive Black man becomes Usher Raymond, and suddenly has a confession to make. Except me. I met Angel my second day on campus, never looked back; we were together, inseparable, close, faithful - and it never mattered. For many sisters on the Hill, I was that nigga, the sellout who hated Africana in word and deed and mind, no better than any low-budget MTV rap hoodlum in a annoying club video with Patsy Paleface shaking her bony absentee ass on Total Request Live. Every brother that treated those women wrong, that climbed into young Kimberly Elise's bed smelling of her sorority sister, that abandoned his alluring caramel-mocha girlfriend for some Jessica Alba rip-off, was more desirable than I, who did not agree with, date, or even know my fellow Negroes. It pissed me off. Mike Lowry and Angel watched me on more than one occasion curse out some overweight Angie Stone impression for daring to impose suspect Blackness upon me if I didn't define my race through my penis. It didn't matter: Uncle Tom Negroes do exist, even at age 21, and I was lumped in with all the rest, those Bryants with clipped vocal tones and muted Polo sweaters, those Kwames who discuss patent law on the impeccably manicured sixteenth green of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Course at Cornell University in Ralph Lauren khakis and Titleist caps, those varied Apprentices, overeducated, articulate, whitewashed, ambitious, who bed Sun Li to lust Elizabeth, who desire money, power, and respect yet sacrifice life, liberty, and happiness, who advertise a Tenth talented and anonymous and foreign to their own communities, who disarm racist fear with mild-mannered sycophancy, who cede humanity to increase productivity - these corporate globalists, these chromium constructs, these plastic people - they are my perversion. They offer home.

Home is where the hatred is, moans modern griot Gil Scott-Heron, as he instructs a faintly snoring Kanye West, magical child prodigy, in Defense Against the White Arts at Hogwarts University. White feminists have to hate Black men in our shared United States of America. More than the hypersexual Mandingo stereotype they both despise and desire, more than the Supermasculine Menial aggression that both arouses and alarms, White feminists hate the attentiveness other men, especially White men, pay the Black Man That You Fear. Remember the alpha plantation philosophy, the original Black Code: the White woman must always remain the center of attention. In 1869 debates within the American Equal Rights Association over possible feminist support of the Fifteenth Amendment, that grants suffrage to all Black men but refuses women the vote, raged acrimoniously between two of the organization's founders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass. Stanton shared acidic, divisive, and inflammatory elitist hatespeech to oppose both second-wave European immigration and freedman's suffrage, often in the most unapologetically racist dogma possible. A Stanton quote from the period: "We prefer Bridget and Dinah at the ballot box to Patrick and Sambo." In January 2004, during filming of the Real World: San Diego, Jacquese, personally offended by an inebriated Robin's public altercation where she shouts racial epithets at random passersby, calls his roommates together for a frank discussion on racial interaction, when Robin, her diva radar blinking, explodes into a tearful tirade on a past rape incident involving Black men. Blame skillful editing or cynical camera-grabbing, but Jacquese's hopes for respectful race conversation shatter when the hefty, busty Robin implodes in an oddly defensive "I'm not a racist for calling them niggers, really! I can say that 'cause niggers raped me!" emotional meltdown of loud, hacking sobs and shrill, banshee screams. Her crocodile tears flowed over her damaging rape memories, yet staunched the attention deficit threatened by rational thought.

In George W. Bush's America, rational thought declares jihad upon false oppression and compassionate conservativism, decrees fatwas against both enemies of the state, and awakens in a cold, gray, unyielding eight by eleven foot concrete cell, extraordinarily rendered somewhere within the coalition of the willing yet without due process of law or the Geneva Convention or simple human decency, for brutal, gut-wrenching, inhuman torture that casts Abu Ghraib as Club Med, a lonely enemy combatant characterized as criminal by his own government, forgotten by his family and friends, and lost to even the most inquisitive and determined Starbucks-caffeinated Woodward and Bernsteins amidst a black and white carbon-copied Freedom of Information Act tempest of self-conscious bureaucratic negligence, your tax dollars at work. Paleoconservative culture war attacks on civil rights and feminist legislation and legal precedents abound without comment, if the overwhelming support for the nomination of relative unknown Judge John Roberts for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America delivers meaningful indication. In our era of base anti-intellectualism, we have not the luxury of emotion-as-oppression; today's stalwart identity politicians and boisterous feminist thinkers can ill afford to promote selfish special treatment as necessary anti-oppression public policy. We must be citizens, not partisans, democrats, not anarchists. I call it the Rev. Al Sharpton Rule: as moral indignation increases, available audience decreases. This is why Rev. Al's rhetorical skill and color certitude know not parallel in our public discourse, even though he never speaks directly on any policy proposal or specific fact. In glowing, flowery, collegiate language historical debate masters Cicero and Henry Clay would've murdered babies to possess, Rev. Al devolves into a mewling Neanderthal any public speaker willing to share a podium with him, ally, enemy, or innocent bystander - yet Black America's latest race leader can not articulate a specific political proposal to achieve any of his pro-Black platform. Rev. Al can't talk rising interest rates, but he knows poor people. Rev. Al can't discuss racist immigration policies, but he knows Haitians. Rev. Al can't convince Democrats of affirmative action's benefits, but he knows Black people. Rev. Al Sharpton - living proof that personal experience does not constitute oppression.

American language fails our populace with similar bombast. In this discourse, I've exposed my personal bias against White women, but even I realize that the term "White women" is too broad, too expansive, too diverse to accurately reflect my longstanding prejudices. Our race speech drowns in the ancient words and antiquated thoughts of past eras and prologue politics; today's diasporic, globalized, commercial racism cannot be confined to national boundaries or unspecific rhetoric. Take for example, the aforementioned Baby Wars. Angel talks about rich parents who drive seven hundred dollar asshole-mobile strollers to run rampant over everyone else's personal space in rude and condescending fashion to rub their radiant social procreation fulfillment complexes in everyone's faces; these parents allow their loud, unruly children to squeal and moan and cry in public spaces ruled by special decorum - movie theaters, airplane cabins, special events - where their progeny's wails just piss everyone else off. Sometimes, these parents publicly revel in the perfect human beauty of their chosen creations by breastfeeding; this raises some concern for general public conditions of non-nude propriety, because in the United States, rightly or wrongly, it is considered socially unacceptable for women to appear topless in public, not to mention illegal. But in all the comments on small child public behavior and public breastfeeding on all the blogs that have talked on these issues this past week, one incredibly important observation continually escapes notice, a fleet-footed Gingerbread Man who avoids the holy hotplates of a convent kitchen.

I speak heresy: all the mothers who breastfeed in public are White! Caucasian, Euro-American, either buzzing White Anglo-Saxon Protestant royalty or assimilated immigrant stock, but in street-level terms, White. Never in my life have I stumbled onto a young mother of color on a park bench or in a franchise restaurant or at a shopping mall with one nipple naked, one breast bared, to feed the angelic ambrosia of mother's milk to a hungry babe. Never. No poor Vietnamese immigrants outside of family bodegas in Chinatown, no middle class Filipinas on the white summer sands of Virginia Beach, Virginia, with oversized Jennifer Lopez beach towels and muscular, bronzed, spiky-haired young fathers in tow, no wealthy African American thirty-something Tracee Ellis Ross doppelganger who holds a cherubic, racially indistinguishable newborn mildly rocking on her Rocawear denim jeans, smiling, happy bourgeoisie Madonna and Child - none ever breastfeed in public. It just doesn't happen. Reasonable racial minority women don't randomly remove clothing in public in any sense; even if our disparate cultures smiled on such maternal exhibitionism, on some minor, minute level, the most counterculture and iconoclastic women of color among us fear mainstream backlash, and shudder at the thought of losing face from a indecent exposure charge. Do you think twenty-two-year-old Syreeta Jenkins from Brooklyn's Marcy Projects really wants to test the anal cavity-plunging NYPD's sensitivity towards young Black mothers? Tawana Brawley's lies resonate loudly today, especially after the Diallo case. So who does a La Leche lament benefit? When the digital thunder struck, and the internet's guerilla feminists launched their Tet Offensive upon the online Saigon at Reappropriate.com with matured mammaries held high, and stormed the instantly foreign non-parent rhetorical strongholds spraying milky ammo upon childless, sex-positive feminist positions, I was caught unawares, a crossfire casualty, and wondered how Ho Chi DruBlood could've possibly instigated such intra-feminist online violence. But at first, I didn't understand the lonely fury of the Desperate Housewives, the rage of a privileged class.

Our homegrown Teri Hatcher terrorists threaten reprisal between their wistful walks down Wisteria Lane; these manicured mothers with immigrant mammies and absentee children present a demographic that begins with privileged Whiteness but includes indifferent middle-class membership and narrow leisure-feminist fanaticism. The later-day descendants of plantation matriarchs and First Lady formality, Desperate Housewives, arrogant beyond human measure, exude stereotypical 1960's traditional nuclear family ignorance of issues as American as chitterlings, kimchee, quesadillas and venison. For the Desperate Housewives, feminism must be drained of its color to mean anything. Think about it: If Darth Drublood wants to physically nourish her small Stormtrooper in the action figure isle of the local Wal-Mart DeathStar, she's more than welcome; there's no need to threaten cauterized dismemberment by scarlet lightsaber if a random servant of the Empire offers a quizzical look or disapproving stare. There is no disturbance of the Force. But let's be honest and forthright on the issue - before assertions of widespread feminist benefit and healthy de-sexualization of women's breasts and females in general from female breastfeeding, we should remember the major beneficiaries of a widespread American social embrace of this controversial issue - the Desperate Housewives.

Notice oppression's extreme makeover: once the concept of an unjust or excessive exercise of power by a powerful prejudiced interest against a particular identity-based group, the Desperate Housewives redefined oppression to reflect conservative antagonism towards Jackie O's orgasmic freedom, cultural gender equality, and female charity case affirmative action in education and athletics and business. Now, oppression as a social phenomena based on societal denial of individual personal choice because of powerful interest prejudice against unchanging, natural, and unalterable group identities is not lost, but rather consciously sacrificed, to characterize all sorts of countermovement perspectives and oppositional speech as total, unreasonable, irrational evil. Notice the difference. The intrinsic minority (a social group based on a shared inherent trait, like racial minorities, or the poor) becomes synonymous with the behavioral minority (a social group based on shared behaviors and personal choices, like religious denominations, or vegans) in a slow marketing campaign where social movements from behavioral minority groups, often populated with highly privileged people, claim the histories, organizational strategies, and rhetoric from social movements from intrinsic minorities, to cement general social support and national cultural acceptance for their group members' personal choices. This was never more true than with the American Civil Rights Movement, still robbed and pillaged and raped today to serve other folks' agendas. The result? The conservative majority (all those who do not consider themselves a member of an oppressed minority, or do not want to consider themselves as such) disregard the sometimes reasonable sociopolitical concerns of oppressed intrinsic minorities, as they can not tell the difference between the real concerns of the disadvantaged, and the concerns of groups trying to deny others the American right to judge and critique and disagree with others' personal choices. Everyone isn't oppressed.

Some people are just inconvenienced. Our immaculate ivory matrons are, in my opinion, most guilty of this "oppression dilution" problem, and feminism's general relevance suffers as a result. Think about it: if the de-sexualization of women's breasts in America's patriarchy is a feminist goal, then what explains the absentee feminist defense of Janet Jackson after her Superbowl 'wardrobe malfunction'? Ain't Janet a woman? Justin Timberlake, the most non-threatening male since Carson Kressley, rips Janet's bodice and exposes her breast to the television cameras (read: simulated male violence toward a woman results in public female nudity), and afterwards Ms. Jackson's reputation bleeds out from millions of media paper cuts and camera slashes as reporters, pundits, and 'experts' demonize one of America's best entertainers as a harlot, a streetwalker, a common whore. If ever there was an opportunity for bold discussion of the feminist desire for breast de-sexualization, 'Nipplegate' offered the silver platter special. But Michael Powell's Federal Communication Commission scores political points with the Puritanical Moral Majority and other right-wing immorality groups by extracting large fines from the corporate media outlets that produced the halftime show, all without a peep from the feminist hordes. Yet again, America unites in unceasing disgust for Black people (public reaction to Hurricane Katrina's New Orleans rape stories is a recent example), but this media lynching against a self-made feminist entertainer lives and breathes and dies without comment from feminists, and we all should know why.

And we do. It's the same reason Helen Zia never tires of relating her stories about her troubles at Ms. Magazine, why sharia law in the Iraqi constitution incenses Max Factor feminists on K Street, but rampant female-driven poverty-stricken single-parent families in SouthEast DC never trouble their sleep - Desparate Housewives care for no one but themselves. Orientalized racism against traditional Asian American cultures force our suburban pals to think of Zia's people as sexist laundrymen only, and our Alexandria, VA pals only consider Black people when they chastise thirteen-year-old Zack about buying a Snoop Dogg album. And in case you were wondering, any legal principles that disenfranchise women anger these people politically, but like all good-natured White activists, it's easier for them to speak with Virgin Mary certitude on other people's backyards then Agent Orange their own weeds.

Angel and Tekanji spoke eloquently on their blogs that the current state of public decorum where men can remove their shirts and women can't offers unfair advantage to men, and is an unjust and unequal social convention. I can understand that. But public breastfeeding, in my opinion, clouds that issue, because it introduces a second action into the equation, one that both sexes can not perform. Here, the Desperate Housewives want to saddle a laudable sociopolitical goal - ending public nudity difference between men and women - with minor, controversial, small, and hotly contested pork - public breastfeeding. To me, that's anti-feminist: it reinforces the idea that to be a feminist, and a strong woman, one must have a domestic, child-rearing focus, it forces people to respect other people's parenting practices without conscious thought, and it promotes the "me-first" anarchism that degenerates feminism into a identity politics redistribution of wealth/ privilege/ power pyramid scheme with the Desperate Housewives cast as the lucky ones. Isn't the real feminist concern encouraging more breastfeeding and pre-natal care for racial minority and poor women - not where women breastfeed, but that they do? Think about it: if feminists are really serious about linking the struggles of young mothers and child-care within feminist concerns, why don't more feminists speak out about racial disparities in pre-natal care, and the fact that fewer Black mothers breastfeed than any other group? Instead of fighting so that Brooke Shields and Catherine Zeta-Jones and Madonna can pop a tidy out outside the hand lotion sales at Bath & Body Works?

No, social disapproval of public breastfeeding is not an oppression. Deal with it: we start calling that oppression, we should devote resources toward fighting it, and frankly, I'm not interested in wasting time and energy and money so that privileged White women can get more of what they want. You don't see brothers walking around with "Free Kate Moss" white tees, do you? Not when Black women are infected with HIV at astronomical rates, and that the rates of HIV infection in the African American community has doubled over the last decade. You want a feminist debate, a real feminist issue? "A 22-year-old woman who has sex with multiple men in an area with very low HIV prevalence, such as a Georgetown bar for well connected young people in D.C. politics, probably has less chance of getting infected than a 22-year-old woman who had sex with only one man in a poor D.C. neighborhood with a very high HIV prevalence," said Adaora A. Adimora, an associate professor of medicine and an adjunct professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Think about that: you can live the Biggie Smalls lyrics of Lil' Kim's debut album Hardcore, as a pretty young White woman with a college education and a decent paying executive assistant gig in Georgetown and be less likely to contract HIV than a pious, God-fearing, churchgoing young Black woman working ten-hour shifts at Long John Silver's for minimum-wage who is sexually active with one man. This is the Sex in the City no one hears about.

I know the war I'm desperate to win.

The First Stepford

2005-09-09T18:00:00.000-07:00

I am an American citizen. I am human. I am angry.

In the rank, oily, brackish, E. coli infested standing water that saturates New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, emergency workers cajole stubborn citizens, unwilling to leave their homes and property, however drenched, dilapidated, and diseased, for the nomadic unknown of diasporic American citizenship. After Superdome starvation, after doctor-sniper privilege, after annihilated infrastructure and broken families and displaced communities, straggler remnants of a working poor metropolis refuse to depart the watery depths that were streets and parks and churches and stores, refuse to leave the abysmal black of neighborhood homes, aged houses, country dining rooms, pastoral porches, Southern bedrooms, slave memories, and human lives. Meanwhile, suburban soccer mom Americana watches Wolf Blitzer on CNN's The Situation Room, wonders aloud among fellow desperate housewives why America's problem people refuse logic to embrace insanity, again. America's problem people inexplicably steal Sony Playstation 2's and Panasonic plasma televisions and AK-47 Kalashnikovs from abandoned Wal-Marts during a natural disaster. America's problem people stay without reason in squalid conditions against the reasonable health concerns of federal emergency personnel. America's problem people complain of media references to 'refugees' when they lack shelter, clothing, food, employment, and hope. America's problem people accuse Americans of racism while they beg America for life support.

America's problem people are the poor, the Black, and the dead.

In truth, Hurricane Katrina has little to do with America's problem people. The vacant stares and hopeless frowns from despondent Negro evacuees who plead desperately with Paula Zahn to reunite with lost loved ones prove that every American politician may count upon cynical American indifference to the unending plight of the dispossessed. No matter how many pickaninnies prime-time on Larry King Live looking for lost mothers, Americans will not be moved to discipline and punish their federal leaders for the recent calamity. The multitude clamors for assistance, for justice, for vengeance, and five days too late our government responds with a bottle of water, a pained Presidential photo-op, and armed National Guardsmen. Political pundits gauge the inevitable fallout from this unnatural leadership disaster, judge with dispassionate prejudice ethereal antagonists like the federal bureaucracy and the welfare state and the war on terror while corporeal Americans suffer without jobs, without homes, and without hope. Living through humanitarian kindness is not living; the jobless and the homeless and the victimized deserve to know why their tax dollars did not ensure prompt assistance and effective rescue. America demands accountability.

We can't provide it. No attitude consensus, no opinion cohesion exists to provide meaning for any American citizen in these troubled times; predictably, the usual bisected political spectrum applies. The Right refuses to acknowledge wrongdoing by anyone except state and local Democrats, differing widely in tone, civility, and vehemence towards all liberals everywhere. If Ann Coulter speculates on an upcoming episode of Hannity & Colmes that the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond planted thousands of poor Black people in the New Orleans Superdome without food, water, or bathroom facilities for five days just to cause President George W. Bush international condemnation and embarrassment, don't say I didn't warn you. In contrast, the Democrats' dismay over President Bush's absent leadership frays into dissonant dissension. Either National Guard overuse in the Iraqi theater caused this urban civic disorder, or Republican good ol' boy cronyism, or basic Bush Administration callousness toward American poverty, or grand old party tax patronage to America's wealthiest ten percent (during wartime), or anti-scientific, anti-intellectual Christian conservative, business-approved Bush Administration ignorance towards global warming, or nonexistent bureaucratic emergency planning and metropolitan evacuation strategy to maintain homeland security, or sheer incompetence, or class warfare, or unabashed racism. The Right exudes unified, fanatical support, the Left flaunts thought plurality without concern for electoral majorities. The Right wins elections and dismantles government services; the Left loses elections and concentrates impotent opposition. Meanwhile, American citizens die; their bloated corpses, soft and brown and impoverished, decompose in Lake New Orleans.

President George W. Bush polarizes for political gain; everyone knows that. Yet Hurricane Katrina unleashed bestial Nature's amoral destruction upon our already charged electorate, released feral winds and savage rain and primal floods upon the magnetic mannequins who populate our divided United States. Katrina mauls the Bush Administration's soft, slack, sloppy emergency measures, rips our phony homeland security hallucinations to rancid, rotting shreds of Cajun barbeque gone sour in muggy Southern heat. To placate Leftists on safari, Michael Brown's FEMA directorship dangles above ravenous reporters at every on-site press conference, yet the balding, incompetent morsel fails to satisfy rabid hunger pangs. Without remorse, pity, or sorrow, once honorable American citizens bite the pulsating jugular of the President we love to hate, lacerate our wounded weekend warrior's second-term agenda, eviscerate our elected sovereign's theoretical ability to purchase public policy bacon for the Christian conservative clogged arteries who deny personal choice yet indulge personal hate. We sense blood. We smell fear.

We fight to live: the electronic, civic, personal, and even physical right to privacy hemorrhages profusely from statuesque flesh torn by fanatical invisible hand conservatives who populate state legislatures and the U.S. Congress, elected by financially despondent social and religious conservatives without decent elementary schools and living wage employment. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy post-traumatic stress disorder Republican pack mentality recoils from homosexual marriage and partial-birth abortion and persistent vegetative states and gangsta rap civil disobedience and rampant Real World: Austin drunken debauchery and child pornographic Calvin Klein fashion advertisements and lascivious Laguna Beach premarital copulation and raunchy Paris Hilton/ R. Kelly sex tapes and bizarre Kobe Bryant/ Michael Jackson show trials and every modern example of American cultural integration, from Eminem to ecstasy, from bukkake to Bowling for Columbine, from abortion to atheism, from death metal to the down low. We choose to battle, battle to choose. And we're losing.

Judge John Roberts, nominated to replace retired Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court of the United States, was recently designated by President George W. Bush as his preference for the recently vacated Chief Justice position. The stellar resume from which no one can derive any legal opinion, save modesty, now desires the utmost judicial position in the United States of America, for life, recommended by the most flagrantly partisan Chief Executive this writer's ever known. Be alarmed, especially if you care for minor conveniences like civil liberties, civil rights, social safety nets, police brutality, free speech, bodily self-control, free elections, ideological plurality, and restrained executive warmongering. Mind you, Judge John Roberts may respect all of these ideas; the Roberts quandary is only that we don't know his general political perspectives at all. No person should receive the highest legal post in the free world just for keeping his mouth shut.

We must speak aloud. No matter how dissonant or irregular, Americans are justified in their myriad critiques of President Bush's butterfingers Hurricane Katrina handling; every gripe mentioned must be investigated fully, from Jacob Weisburg's to Jack Shafer's, from David Brooks' to Frank Rich's, from Howard Dean's to Eugene Robinson's. No matter how contentious or painful or violent, we need a serious, productive, public policy fruitful discussion on race and class in the United States of America, one that includes conservative apathy towards poverty and liberal ignorance of poor people, one that involves instinctive African American rage and learned European American fear, one that involves classic American individual upward mobility and traditional American institutional class stratification. We need to hammer out race and class with respect to both and privilege to neither. And the trophy wife shouldn't impede our efforts.

First Lady Laura Bush, when giving an interview to American Urban Radio Networks, criticized as 'disgusting' comments by Kanye West, Howard Dean, Rev. Jesse Jackson and others that race and class colored federal reluctance to assist hurricane victims along the Gulf Coast.

"I think all of those remarks are disgusting, to be perfectly frank, because of course President Bush cares about everyone in our country," the First Lady said Thursday in an interview with American Urban Radio Networks. "And I know that. I mean, I'm the person who lives with him," she said. "I know what he's like and I know what he thinks and I know how he cares about people."
The First Lady also said: "I do think -- and we all saw this -- that poor people were more vulnerable. They live in poor neighborhoods; their neighborhoods were the ones that were more likely to flood, as we saw in New Orleans. Their housing was more vulnerable, and that what we saw and that's what we want to address in our country."

Is Laura Bush high? How dare the First Stepford denigrate reasonable race questions in such dismissive, discarding fashion! Notice the stark discourse termination attempt here: it's not just that the Kanye West allegation 'George Bush doesn't care about Black people' is simply untrue, or false, or even slanderous. The First Stepford finds such rhetoric so repugnant that it does not warrant discussion, that reasonable Americans debase themselves through such tawdry interrogation. Something disgusting offends the moral senses, nauseates the body human; one cannot function properly with a disgusting smell or taste or sight or idea in close proximity. This genteel Texan librarian connotes the putrid, the contaminated, the repugnant, with her expert dismissal of racial discrimination's very possibility as explanation for despondent federal disaster relief after Hurricane Katrina. Laura Bush semiotically parallels the partially decomposed corpses of poor New Orleans flood victims, beaten and bloated and Black, with any suggestion that they died because of their darker shade. To discuss race is to divide America according to conservative political thought, so real patriotism demands groupthink silence and Maoist political correctness, demands irrational belief in and illogical support for a lethargic Leviathan who leaves all people behind, except for the wealthy and the White. Today, stating the obvious is state treason.

Today, I'm an American Taliban. The mechanical animal who birthed President Bush's personal American Idols disrespects American intelligence with her religious Republican anti-race rhetoric. The prevailing social division in American society throughout our young history is race. Regardless of whose personal feelings are slighted, whose moral sensibilities are insulted, or whose Samaritan charity is questioned, it is possible for reasonable individuals to discuss race in America, including the President of the United States of America. If George Bush cares about Black people, Mrs. Bush, please explain the rampant disenfranchisement of African American voters during Election 2000, the constant refusal of President Bush to discuss African American political issues with Black polemics and statesmen, the general distrust and enmity between African American voters and the Republican Party (8% of Black voters voted Bush/ Cheney in 2000, 11% in 2004), and the starving, mewling, terrorized Black multitudes left without food or water or bathrooms or law enforcement or medical attention or any federal assistance whatsoever in New Orleans for days on President Bush's watch. Rather, don't explain anything: just be willing to have a conversation about massive governmental miscalculation, impropriety, and incompetence that examines all possible causalities. But even beyond that, don't hide in the oppression of your choice.

Americans fail to discuss class inequity in our discourse because of several factors. Sometimes our omnipresent Adam Smith spirit guide sparks revulsion towards any and all collectivist ventures, sometimes financial system so distances rich and poor, upper class and lower class, immigrant and native born, that useful class discussion can not exist. The placid, polite, immaculate Laura Bush, soulless vision of neo-Victorian beauty, assassinates useful class discourse following Hurricane Katrina, using class difference as a bludgeon to batter racial animosity toward her husband. To speak with authority on class while denying race with impunity plays upon well-worn White Northeastern liberal ideology that cements all domestic sociopolitical inequality in rigid economic difference and conceives all possible race prejudice from uneducated backwater Southerners. Further, Lockheed Martin's prototype faith-based initiative ignores an undeniable truth - American poverty has gotten worse under George W. Bush's watch. According to the recent Nicholas D. Kristof column, The Larger Shame, "The U.S. Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year earlier. After declining sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor people has now risen 17 percent under Mr. Bush." Compassionate conservativism translates into cynical capitalism. Laura Bush must realize that in five years as President, her husband has made no real effort to address American poverty; to speak on what he may wish to accomplish rings hollow to all those forced to sit and wait in cavernous sports arenas and stifling homeless shelters for thoughtful citizens to provide economic relief. But that's alright, the poor and the Black and the dead love subsistence living! Just ask your mother-in-law, Barbara.

Laura Bush, a disingenuous social Darwinist with Eurocentric flesh lamination like Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator, masks her crafted, sculpted distaste for African American political rage with the impeccable eloquence and perfect diction of a time-lost daughter of Dr. Noonian Soong. She dreams in digital, this mechanical Marie-Antoinette, and one can safely bet that her positronic phantasmagoria portrays no one of African decent. The poor and the Black and the dead - the original American virus - won't rewrite her programming.

The Wretched of the Earth

2005-09-02T23:15:00.000-07:00

This for Mississippi, and every place y'all treat like Mississippi.
Y'all wouldn't give us shit, we gone take it, bitch. YEAH!
-David Banner, "Bush", from his debut Mississippi the Album

I hid from the news. For days, I avoided any mention of Hurricane Katrina. In my hometown of Portsmouth, Virginia, a hurricane was a large and powerful thunderstorm that always threatened major collateral damage yet never delivered. Skies darkened, clouds grayed, winds blew, trees swayed. Outside of extremely minor flooding on low-lying streets, nothing of note really happened. I always stayed home and played video games. A bad hurricane for me growing up was when electric service ceased and I read Peter David's novel Imzadi by candlelight. So, Hurricane Katrina held no interest for me; the commercial symbolism of rock music's forced resurgence at MTV's recent Video Music Awards - a show I didn't watch - was more interesting than constant coverage on a Category 5 hurricane.

Yesterday, I watched CNN and lost my national innocence.

Massive, total destruction. Burning water above downed power lines. A flooded metropolis. Sniper fire. Random violence. Human suffering. Barbarism. Animalism. Theft. Rape. Sickness. Death. On American soil.

Not Bosnia. Not Rwanda. Not Fallujah. Not Malaysia. Right here, in the United States of America, your fellow citizens wait with taxed patience for federal disaster relief amidst demoralized savagery and subhuman conditions. Today marks the sixth day. As if to demonstrate the surreal calamity in the Mississippi River Delta, CNN's Nic Robertson, international correspondent known for on-location reporting in global political hot spots like Kabul, Afghanistan or Mogadishu, Somalia delivered commentary from New Orleans; what's next, Christiane Amanpour live from the Houston Astrodome? Stories of exhausted young Black mothers hobbling along country roads and flooded streets to escape certain death by drowning or starvation or disease fill the airwaves. Acrid black smoke from random fires dot New Orleans; disgusting, contaminated water filled with bacteria and gasoline and desiccating human bodies saturates the Big Easy, threatening diseases like cholera and dysentery upon an already devolved electorate. Doctors work without sufficient power or medicine or food or water at makeshift hospitals at the New Orleans International Airport; nurses give each other IV's, according to CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, to maintain their strength to care for the dying. Disheartening images of impoverished elderly men and women languishing in hellish heat plaster the national news; their corpses rot before shell-shocked Southerners and a world audience baffled by the complete and utter deconstruction of American society within the continental United States.

Experts predicted years in advance that the levies protecting New Orleans from utter calamity were vulnerable to powerful hurricanes, yet those warnings sounded upon the deaf and the uncaring. The human cost of this unprecedented event has yet to be determined. The New York Times called the anemic, belated disaster relief efforts seen today "a very costly game of catch-up", while noting that Iraq deployment of Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard units may have severely hampered relief efforts. The Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson publicly attack the President's shuffling, shucking and jiving disaster relief response, a response that allows untold numbers of working poor African Americans to die on their feet amid rising water and scarce resources and simple human wastes. Mental note to Lou Dobbs: Just because New Orleans is seventy percent Black and the city power structure is nearly exclusively Black and Mayor Ray Nagin is Black, does not mean that every national Black politician should immediately assassinate local Black political leaders to satisfy White sensibilities about a national public service failure. The apocalypse now endured in New Orleans, the catastrophic cessation of all public infrastructure and order, embarrasses the United States, cripples our global standing, and deserves swift and complete accountability at the highest levels of American federal government. Mr. Bush, you deserve impeachment.

"No one wants to see any American suffer," says Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, when answering charges by the Congressional Black Caucus that race and class encouraged the Bush Administration's lazy response to assist impoverished African Americans in Louisiana and Mississippi. Her constant evasion and emotional sidestepping of the obvious - those low on capital and high on melanin are utterly inconsequential her Chief Executive - displays a conflicted and complicated African American conservative response to the callous indifference the modern Grand Old Party shows towards America's weakest members. Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans, Louisiana should not have to curse out the federal government to secure federal help for his dying citizenry. During times like this, I do not comprehend why any free thinking African American could vote Republican. Black America has endured the most patently anti-Black Presidency I've ever known, including the Reagan years. (Don't believe me? Ask Kanye West.) President Bush steals office by disenfranchising African American voters, refuses to discuss anything with any Black leader or organization that he hasn't handpicked, demonstrates a callous disregard for the financial squeeze his economic policies cause hardworking citizens, and now mismanages Hurricane Katrina disaster relief so completely that those unfortunate souls unable to care for themselves are now plastered all over CNN in stark relief: the poor, the Black, and the dead. All day yesterday, my wide-eyed horrified stare observed masses of impoverished Black Southerners baking in unmerciful August heat among contaminated water and broken toilets and rotting garbage, watched the young and the middle-aged and the old weep with hopeless despair, heard sweaty Black men recount stories of bloated corpses - their neighbors - floating like driftwood past their front doors.

Black men. Dangerous, scary, young Black men. America's longest national nightmare made corporeal and physical and larcenous. Much of the media coverage centers around repeated images of rampant looting of local businesses for supplies and luxury items by not-yet-recovered citizens, and an amorphous criminal element that impedes meager relief efforts from helping those in need. First, the looters. You can understand the looting by first understanding dehumanized poverty. People with no personal political tethers to accepted societal morality, people who operate on the fringes of America during the best of times, people normally abandoned and consistently controlled by the police powers of a indifferent and callous capitalist order have no reason to abide by American moral reverence for private property in the absence of a ruling military presence. I have no judgment for any looter of any items - given personal immersion in those abysmal circumstances, I can not tell you what my actions would entail. We are watching a modern American state of nature; the utter breakdown of governmental control can not be judged or criticized or moralized through comfortable climate controlled reason alone.

Next, the criminals. The 'roving gangs of violent men' the twenty-four hour broadcast media pontificates on relentlessly, who snipe stranded hospital patients and threaten rescue operations in New Orleans, mirror similar bands of armed anarchists in Liberia, Sudan, Rwanda, Somalia, and Iraq; the constant display of young, muscular, dark Black men on these channels reinforces violent Supermasculine Menial stereotypes to lull the American public into the belief that the usual suspects totally comprise the unchecked criminality of post-Katrina New Orleans. Rather, the isolated metropolis displays the cessation of American law and order: the only relevant criminal activity here is the atrocious and inadequate and overdue federal disaster relief measures undertaken by the Bush Administration. President George W. Bush failed to make the world safe from terrorist attack, failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, failed to secure peace and maintain civic infrastructure in Iraq, and now failed to ensure the domestic tranquility of American citizens under extreme duress. The Bush Administration cut Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funding, treating the agency like 'an unwanted stepchild' according to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. The Bush Administration diverted a third of the Louisiana National Guard to Iraq. The Bush Administration left those without money or health or youth to chance in a metropolitan area widely predicted to destroy itself in a perfect storm. As was true during Election 2000, President Bush's sacrificial lambs again resemble the Black sheep of our American family.

Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces. - Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

The American colonizer still fears the Black native. Yesterday's repeated question was "who shoots at unarmed hospital patients?", today's is "who's burning the New Orleans ruins?" President Bush, Head Colonizer In Charge, waxes Crawford philosophical over the unwavering American spirit while babies die on American soil of malnutrition and thirst. Meanwhile, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) put the phantom American insurgents on notice, shouting of the National Guardsmen who've arrived "fresh back from Iraq". "These are some of the 40,000 extra troops that I have demanded," Blanco said. "They have M-16s, and they're locked and loaded ... I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will." This sentiment displays without doubt the complete disregard for African American suffering shown by governmental officials. Amid the worst humanitarian disaster in United States history, the Governor of Louisiana treats its victims like hardened convicts in a prison riot. Criminality certainly stymied some relief efforts, but this 'Battle of New Orleans' should be a mission of mercy that delivers food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, and safety to the scared. You can't save anyone if you're shooting at them.

Any pretenses about the sanctity of the American spirit or the stainless honor of the American body politic have been shattered, crushed, and discarded by the Bush Administration. We have witnessed the demise of the American Dream. Houses smashed into wet matchsticks and kindling. Businesses flooded beyond repair. Wal-Marts raided for food and water and fuel and clothes and sneakers and knives and guns. Blond, busty, blue-eyed national newscasters speak of American 'refugees' who drag their tired, battered, demoralized bodies from the horrific squalor and standing water and inhumane conditions of New Orleans along several hours in charter busses without air-conditioning to be turned away from the Houston Astrodome to locations so undisclosed, the drivers don't even know where they're headed.

The United States of America is a different country today, a primeval, feral, Neanderthal nation without civility or civilization or simple human decency. We are the worst we have to offer. We are a nation of rich cynics shocked by our own barbarism, waiting for our turn at the chopping block. What's worse, this could all have been prevented. Simple, logical organization of all available manpower to help those who could not help themselves - the moral purpose of federal power in a modern industrialized liberal democracy - could have saved lives: organized removal of the poor and homeless days ago, when Category One Katrina introduced itself to Florida, or food and supply airdrops over New Orleans after the levies broke - anything but abandonment. Fuck 20/20 hindsight! No American citizen can today believe that the federal government can or would help them if their homes, livelihoods, and utilities are destroyed by actions outside their control. None of us. No American citizen can today believe that their country can do for them when they cannot do for themselves. Given this, what is the point of doing anything for our country? Why volunteer to fight an unjust, illegal, commercial war, when your fellow citizens can't be rescued from heavy rains, high winds, and their own bodily wastes? What's the point of voting when the guy the minority voted for bungles both foreign policy and domestic health in such cataclysmic fashion? To all Republicans: why give a damn about illegal immigration when the society the impoverished illegal aliens claw and scratch and steal their way into refuses to save it's weakest and neediest from natural calamity and public anarchy? What's the national character of a country that reduces those without capital to those without voice, those without help, those without life?

President Bush murders America when he refuses to help Americans.

Whether his acts are sins of commission or omission, they deserve investigation. Whether his callousness displays the rich man's ancient indifference towards the poor or the White man's ancient prejudice towards the Black, it demands accountability. President Bush's compassionate conservativism unmasked today as a separate but unequal phenomenon, reserved for wealthy metropolitans in New York and denied to destitute metropolitans in New Orleans. With Bull Connor's bastard child in the White House, no amount of fervent prayer or political cajoling will alter Hurricane Katrina's violent commoner's sense - your government does not care about you. The poor and the Black and the dead, decomposing underwater, or on public streets, or in alleyways, demand justice no one can provide, because federal authorities (or Karl Rove, or whomever) are not concerned with the public welfare of the American people. Law-abiding, taxpaying Americans were eaten by rats on the streets of New Orleans because the Bush Administration found their economic contributions lax and their racial configuration undesirable. African Americans, reduced to the 'undifferentiated brown stuff' of George Orwell's Marrakech, invisible in plain twenty-four hour news camera sight, are the perfect victims of federal apathy. We hate their dangerous violence. We hate their persistent poverty. We hate their expressive speech and their colorful colloquialisms and their creative music. We hate their minority cultures. We hate their grace, their passion, their strength. We hate their brown skin. We hate the fact they exist.

We hate the poor, the Black, and the dead.

Every time a political pundit or robotic reporter wonders aloud why the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina exposes a race and class dynamic I cringe. There's no big secret - the Bush Administration hates Black people. Well-educated tokens willing to tote the grand old party line past pathetic concerns of reason or reputation or sanity may apply, but the starving Black underclass left indigent and depleted in the post-colonial, post-integration post-apartheid affirmative action environment may as well commit Jonestown mass suicide as far as this Administration is concerned. Our democracy functions because of the tireless efforts of those we don't see. The minimum-wage labor that cooks and cleans and cares for the wealthy and the White only exist as news stories for the general G-8 public. The poor and the Black and the dead materialize as convicts like the Washington sniper John Muhammad or the Atlanta courtroom killer Brian Nichols. The poor and the Black and the dead live as flashing statistics on American national poverty or printed percentages on American teenage pregnancy. The poor and the Black and the dead benefit from our affirmative action benevolence, profit from our Social Security charity. The poor and the Black and the dead deserve incarceration, provoke police brutality, justify capital punishment. The poor and the Black and the dead are social parasites, oily obsidian leeches who drain our scarce American resources from within.

The poor and the Black and the dead are the wretched of the earth. When we choose not to help them, we damn our own souls.

God Bless America.

Update: More on Kanye West's nationally televised pimpslap of President Bush. MSNBC has the Kanye video. C-SPAN.org has video of the Congressional Black Caucus' honorable disgust with the President. Also, check out Michelle Malkin's knee-jerk defense of the worst President in modern American history.

For sanity and reason, hit up Reappropriate.com, Crunk & Disorderly, and Solitaire Redux.

The Melanin Machine

2005-08-31T21:00:00.000-07:00

Home Box Office introduced me to Heather Hunter.

Sassy, sexy and confident, Heather Hunter, the mainstream face of African American pornography for over a decade, first appeared before my puberty-glazed brown eyes sometime in the mid-Nineties, during the affirmative action segment of an early episode of HBO's Real Sex. In bed with Akineyele to film a sex show, in a meeting to write an adults only comic book, and in a studio to promote a radio show, Heather Hunter emerged as a prostitute for all seasons, an idyllic muse for art if Norman Rockwell ever caught jungle fever. Her gaudy sexuality aside, Double H developed into the only African American female performer of recent memory to display the business savvy found in sex starlets such as Jenna Jameson and Danni Ashe. The first and only African American female inductee into the Adult Film Hall of Fame, Heather Hunter enjoyed constant referencing and name-dropping by hip-hop artists throughout her career, including Lil' Kim, LL Cool J, and Snoop Dogg. Given today's pop culture climate, one shouldn't be surprised that, eventually, Heather Hunter would record a hip hop album.

Heather Hunter personifies race and sex oppression's demise through individual agency; this B-list Bronx feminist does not possess Jennifer Lopez's fame or fortune, yet operates similarly on-screen to provide brazen, sleazy sexual arousal to male film viewers willing to pay-per-erection. The point? Whenever men watch Heather Hunter on film, she offers the fantasy of sexual possession; to view Double H ramrodded by Lexington Steele or Sean Michaels or Peter North is to indulge in a taboo phantasmagoria of Black female possession by virile, turgid, unstoppable masculine power, Sally Hemings cowed and timid and spread eagle for the man in her life.

Heather Hunter, a street-level capitalist in every respect, lies sore and sweaty and spent on plasma television screens the world over, drips lewdly from used, raw, reddened orifices slimy with the mother-of-pearl ejaculate her clients' concrete pillars spray without concern. Radio playable Jazze Pha Southern crunk stripper bass pounds incessantly in the background; pussy-popping, booty-shaking, low-budget audio lechery provides the appropriate soundtrack. Without a moment's respite, another arrogant anonymous member invades whatever remains of Heather Hunter's inner sanctum, her God-given temple of life's promise, without remorse or pity or sorrow for the unholy perversion her worn, loose, malleable genitals allow for profit. Meanwhile, many men's furious palms frenzy about tired, sweaty, barely lubricated phalluses, hoping in worried vain for momentary bliss; their warped minds absorb devalued femininity and wanton whorishness as the divine, natural state of all women. The numerous men's glossy fixed stares - green, hazel, blue, brown - drink Heather's defiant submission, relish Hunter's easy physicality. This isn't love, this is ownership. Not sex, control. Without warning, the pitiful anonymous watch Heather Hunter's chiseled brown back arch violently, her immaculate Revlon lashes squeeze with oncoming delight. A grimace. A gasp. A scream. Double H's mascara runs. Panasonics the world over require immediate Windex attention. Big Tigger, longtime host of Black Entertainment Television's Rap City, cuts to commercial.

Heather Hunter is hip hop. I used to lust H.E.R.

Lust, not love. Hip hop's syncopated streetwalker never presents wholesome Americana; Snoop Dogg, darling of Long Beach and Park Avenue, translated the apathetic delinquency of inner-city killers not yet old enough to shave to the mainstream Music Television audience, including one perennially uncool African American thirteen-year-old lover of astronomy, Jeopardy, and ancient Greece. "Gin & Juice" began my lifelong trysts with hip hop; she was already hollow and morose and licentious before she bothered to arouse my pubescent sensibilities. The archetypal video vixen, hip hop transformed a straight-laced, stalwart, Clark Kent squarejaw into a down brother in a reverse Pygmalion straight-to-video featuring Beyonce Knowles and scored by The RZA. Notice the economic genius of hip hop: with cable television, incessant Clear Channel radio airplay and foolishly expensive compact discs, international record conglomerates could produce scientifically quantified urban culture to middle-class and upper middle-class multicultural America for virtually nonexistent startup cost, through the promise of lavish rockstar hedonism to the few poor African American rap musicians who could stir today's colored proletariat masses with rhyming couplets in the revolutionary manner of last generation's Eldridge Cleaver and Fred Hampton and Huey Newton. Incidentally, that was the marketing blueprint for intellectual thug scion Tupac Shakur, and the reason he's still a platinum artist today, years after his death. In reality, hip hop quenches the unceasing demand by mainstream soccer mom, red state, fair and balanced Fox News Channel Americana for easily attainable, personal immersion in underclass chic, drenches the majority in the counterculture cool of the minority. Double H was always a whore, above empathy or affection, beyond good and evil. Absent any paltry moralistic concerns, hip hop fertilizes street creditability with corporate greed to birth global profit, unites the entire industrialized world population with the infectious self-interest of attainable Negro style. Hip hop is prepackaged, shipped, distributed. Hip hop, is Blackness commodified.

Blackness. Not just Black culture, or Black people, but the very indefinable essence of what it means to be Black, from the macro to the micro, for the many and the few, or the one. Hip hop unmasks to reveal commercialized melanin. This natural pigment prophecies danger, allure, exotica, erotic fear and uncivilized fury for all non-Blacks in the American sociopolitical sphere of influence. All humans possess some quantity of melanin, yet those members of the African Diaspora have melanin more abundantly. Americans craft long standing traditional and new age skin color prejudices around melanin content; we shape our conceptions of safety, beauty, intelligence, virility, and power around our proximity to and possession of melanin. The color controls our lives.

Color has certainly laid claim to my brief existence so far. Recent online discussions over the indefensible antics of Jeremy Parker, a.k.a. Tha Pumpsta, led me to a brief inventory of the voluminous attempts non-Blacks make publicly to don neo-blackface, to attempt transracial immersion into African American youth culture and history without absorbing racial stigmatization. It's a basic question: if Blackness can be commodified, who's buying? In my generation, in my opinion, everyone's a broker, and African Americans resemble Ferengi. Case in point: Tony Rome and Maven Strategies. The Washington Post, recently breaking more news on the social and economic ramifications of hip hop than the entrie print runs of The Source and XXL Magazine, informed the public this past Monday of a little known marketing company that pairs materialistic, flossy, gaudy, shiny Jacob-the-Jeweler imprinted, platinum record selling hip hop artists with major corporations to promote corporate products' brand names through the omnipresent advertising Mecca that is hip hop. Think of all the Adidas and Air Force Ones and Hennessy and Courvoisier and Armadale Vodka and Vitamin Water and Phat Farm and DKNY and Sean John and Rocawear people buy thanks to some unwashed rapper's recommendation. The entire mid-Nineties explosion of New York City Big Willie rap, pioneered by the late Notorious B.I.G., morphed our syncopated streetwalker from nihilistic nefariousness to Fifth Avenue formality. One day "Life's a Bitch", the next we're "Poppin' Tags". "Natural Born Killers" now spend the majority of their time "In Da Club". If nothing else, the George W. Bush-style public transformation of Ice Cube from Amerikkka's Most Wanted weapon of mass destruction to family friendly Hollywood action star should legitimize for all critics hip hop's capitalist original sin. Double H 'paid the cost to be the boss', and we all sold our souls.

Today, we are the Devil of our own details. In methods too numerous to mention, hip hop allows the general public to purchase Blackness at their leisure. The problem begins when a fickle, demanding body politic realizes that keyboard-heavy Dr. Dre sonic production can not bestow melanin. The Marshall Mathers LP hammers this truth into all mainstream White Americans: no matter how poor you were growing up, how dysfunctional your parents, how painstakingly you study rap history and narrative flow, how many throwback jerseys and Akademic jeans and Timberland boots you wear, how many 2Pac verses you quote from memory, how often you renew your subscription to Rap Pages, how much street slang you spit, how polished your pimp cup, how crunk you get in the club, or how many Black friends you have, you will never be Black. Never ever. Never ever? Never ever. And, ironically, it's your fault.

Our Founding Fathers forged a social, economic and legal system upon their arrival in North America that depended on extreme racial stratification to preserve the unfree labor early American society required, from their perspective. Anti-miscegenation laws, prohibitions again slave education, the Three-Fifths Compromise - all these early American statutes forged the beginnings of American legal history. And just as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas sparked a social revolution that forever altered American mores on race separation and unequal treatment, early slave codes congealed prevailing ideologies about displaced Africans in America that exist today - including the myth of the randy, hypersexual, muscular, obnoxiously virile African American Supermasculine Menial. Remember this excerpt from last week's Washington Post?

"It's about being nasty, people come to grind on each other," said Bianca Casady, 23. "It's like friends being sexual with each other." Casady was raised in Santa Barbara, Calif., but quickly notes her worldliness by listing the cities where she has lived along the trail to Brooklyn. A regular Kill Whitie partygoer, she tried the conventional (that is, non-hipster) hip-hop clubs but found the men "really hardcore." In this vastly whiter scene, Casady said that "it's a safe environment to be freaky."

Safe environment? What, are the brothers at most NYC hip hop clubs so hard-up for shaven hipster White girl booty that they skee-skee-skeet on the girls as soon as "Get Low" comes on? No. White America creates and maintains racial stereotypes about African Americans, then blames Black people for their fears, and justifies the rape of Black creative expression with those same self-serving ideologies of hate. This is why hip hop, try as it might, can never be a perfect melanin conduit for wealthy non-Blacks: Whiteness gets in the way. Whiteness impedes transracialization, as it bestows upon the few and the proud and the mainstream anonymous apolitical success expectations, better known as white privilege. Mind you, that's not very much. White privilege does not provide happiness or wealth or safety; white privilege can not create strong bones or healthy teeth. White privilege won't stop dangers foreign or domestic, can't stop disasters natural or terrorist. However, whiteness bestows individuality, to a degree impossible for persons of color in identity politic America. Whiteness grants closer proximity to mainstream beauty than Halle Berry or Jennifer Lopez or Lucy Liu will ever know. Whiteness confers true innocence until proven guilty. Plus, Whiteness appropriates every non-White creative force or cultural innovation like cold, vampire Borg clamoring for new technology. Resistance is futile; any exultation by an American White people to 'kill the Whiteness inside" is not shouted in good faith.

People always need more. It's not enough to get one's freak on to old-school Miami bass, some people need an all-White environment in order to feel 'safe'. It's not enough that suburban Whites encompass the majority of domestic hip hop album sales(roughly seventy percent, by some estimates), Music Television and nationwide concert promoters didn't really feel comfortable with hip hop until the entire Black rapper community supported the great White hope, Eminem. It's not enough that a non-Black hip hop fan can enjoy and produce any element of hip hop he wishes without any Black influences whatsoever, some non-Blacks wish to assert original ownership over the spoken word and graffiti hip hop periphery. Blame the information age. In a world where most teenagers have no problems with government-sponsored propaganda masquerading as impartial, objective news coverage, and where young people have never heard the original songs Kanye West and Jessica Simpson sample and remake with impunity, American youth's pop culture short-term memory erases more than it retains. Who needs Africa Bambaataa or Public Enemy in present-day hip hop? Unless they've done a collaboration with 50 Cent, they're no longer relevant.

So where does that leave Double H? Her concrete jungle's shades of grey digitized into cacophonous white noise, but her pixelated pussy now accepts Visa donations via Pay-Pal. Hip hop is modern Blackness' ghost in the machine. Morally primitive yet infinitely adaptable, Double H is the indispensable American cultural economic force, and tenders neo-Blackness to any member of the global village without concern for physical, racial, or cultural location. Hip hop proves that the old notions of Blackness and Whiteness, once rigid and static, now acquiesce to electronic fluidity and wireless instantaneous communication. What is race against a broadband connection? Remember, today's technologically advanced age promises innovation in practically every facet of daily living, from communication to national defense, from medicine to personal entertainment. We sell blue diamond pills for erectile dysfunction, perform delicate heart surgery on newborn infants, repair high-powered telescopes in outer space and contact relatives separated by vast distances with push-button sequences. Live in a G-8 nation today, and chances are, your possibilities for personal advancement through mechanical ease are endless. Imagination, infinite human wonder, remains the only real obstacle to human creation, and imagination's intangible. Everyone's technoorganic.

Therefore, a reasonable, and profitable invention would be technology that could imbue an individual with all the cultural markers, personal savoir-faire, interpersonal empathy, and pop culture cool of the most trendy, strong, hypersexual Will Smith Black man, regardless of the biochemical shell he was both with. Think of a barcode Hitch ghetto pass that never changed physical outward appearance or epidermal eumelanin polymer concentration (to preserve original privilege), yet allowed total line-item freedom to appropriate any culture imaginable, including African American youth culture, without any interpersonal side-effects around any group of people. I'd call it the Melanin Machine. Sure, it seems like science fiction, but consider the possibilities, outside of international espionage. Impervious transracial camouflage not even Rev. Jesse Jackson could detect would be the Da Vinci Code of current mainstream transracial appropriation; every person who sees a little bit of themselves in know-nothing hip hop fans like Tha Pumpsta would pay everything they could to buy and maintain such technology. Think of it: the utter and complete devolution of race and sex and class to technological innovation, Double H orgasmic. Be forewarned: you've just glimpsed the future of hip hop.

Update: Dan Charnas, reporter, screenwriter, and record producer, penned a introspective post entitled The Unbearable Whiteness of Being, that offers a reasoned glimpse into the motivations of some White Americans who indulge the inexplicable urge to appropriate distinct minority cultural traits like hip hop. Mind you: I disagree wholeheartedly with the sentiments expressed here, but I respect not only Charnas' candor and eloquence, but more importantly his authentic handling of a touchy subject for many White people - the personal motivations of cultural appropriation. But we can expect no less - this is the man who executive produced the most lyrically complex rap album ever made, Chino XL's masterpiece Here to Save You All.

Who's the Victim?

2005-08-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

The cacophony abounds; can you drown the sound?

The Iraqi quagmire terminates good-natured American volunteer soldiers before the unblinking hazel-green optics of twenty-four hour xenophobic voyeurs who couldn't spell 'Shiite' before September 11, 2001, and always mispronounce the proper noun. Lonely mothers, fatigued fathers, bawling brothers, stalwart sisters, screaming spouses, and furious friends mark the passing of their heroic loved ones in this misbegotten war with candlelight vigils, tearful prayer services, and improbable protests in the quintessential Southern machismo state, near the summer cottage of an aristocrat President so stubborn he visualizes a victory no one else can see. This naked Emperor cycles with Lance Armstrong, dodges rotting flag-draped corpses and whiny proletariat parents in his personal valley of the shadow of death, replete with Secret Service protection. He believes his actions are just. "These brave men and women gave their lives for a cause that is just and necessary for the safety of the country, and now we will honor their sacrifice by completing the mission," shouts President Bush. He convinces himself he does what he must to protect America. He fights the terrorists 'over there' to protect us over here. He knows we hate him for it.

The President is a victim.

A right-wing talk-radio pundit and hatespeech author who refers to Islam - the entire religion - as a "terrorist organization" waxes philosophical about political correctness and freedom of speech to convince you his recent firing by ABC Radio executives was unjust and unfair. Michael Graham, author of Redneck Nation: How the South Really Won the War, believes that his former employer acquiesced to a politicized minority group too sensitive or too backward to hear unpleasant truths about itself. In the hyperbolic, disaffected, infuriated, inflamed American sonic rash known as conservative talk radio, humanoid ideology irritations seep injurious innuendo and unchecked rumor about racial minorities, liberal politicos, immigrants, homosexuals, feminists, the secular, the educated, the poor, the weak, and the defenseless into curious listeners and die-hard reactionaries like so much acidic pus. Michael Graham, a minor, miniscule, unimportant conservative concept-assassin, G. Gordon Liddy's spineless alternative lifestyle, symbolizes both talk radio's shrill Howard Stern-Rush Limbaugh synthesis effect, where minor-league political pundits no one's ever heard of broadcast spiteful, sinister, dehumanizing commentary on expected minority groups into the nation's morning work commute to boost ratings, and the paradoxical coarsening of American political thought by the shock-jock streetwalkers bought and paid for by the party of traditional family values, one-man one-woman marriage, and compassionate conservativism, the Republicans. Ken Mehlman still has Michael Graham's receipt. Michael Graham realizes his firing was just, given advertiser anxiety and increasing public outcry; he just does not care.

Michael Graham is a victim.

Jeremy Parker, a.k.a. Tha Pumpsta, rocks nearly all-White New York City parties with his derived and passe blend of pornographic old-school Miami bass and exhorts his frenzied partygoers to "Kill Whitey!" in a conscious misappropriation of African American political culture. Drenched in cynical ignorance or cunning irony (depending on your tolerance for anti-Black behavior), Parker's monthly "Kill Whitie" parties in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for the hip, trendy, and Caucasoid, appeal to apathetic youngsters so pale and hollow and cruel they justify their stereotypical MTV generation neo-blackface with a paltry reference to mainstream American cultural emptiness. Here's Parker's own words, from today's Washington Post:

"I'm throwing this party, and it's obvious that I'm white and I'm kind of appropriating this culture but in an ironic way," said Tha Pumpsta, whose name is Jeremy Parker. The 25-year-old takes his Pumpsta moniker from his high-top sneakers. "Kinda poking fun at myself and my origins and white people in general," he said.

"I'm trying to kill the whiteness inside," Parker added, although his blue eyes, milk-white skin and blond hair might suggest he has some work ahead of him.

Jeremy Parker, a.k.a. Tha Pumpsta, reminds me of the 'pimp & ho' parties young White collegians adored during my Cornell years. Privileged, wealthy WASP scions dressed down into loud, comical player hats, sleeveless t-shirts, wavecaps, and (if they wanted to be fancy) their grandfather's zoot suits to accompany scantily-clad sorority sisters to parties saturated with piss-poor alcohol, rhythmless dancing, and DMX dance tunes barely popular years ago. All of those parties were quests for pure truth; elbow yourself onto the slippery dance floor at any White fraternity house in the Ivy League during a weekend party and I guarantee you DMX will be played there during that night, followed by every 50 Cent single you never need to hear again in your lifetime. Those children will play "Party Up" and "In Da Club" so often you'll think the iTunes was skipping at Quddus' apartment.

Inebriated walking trust funds bounce and shimmy and sway -- no, they stutter and slip and fall, oblivious to the booming Roland TR-808 drums and their revolting RZA-meets-RuPaul gangsta drag. Parker himself alludes callous awareness of this; the most insidious privilege is the ability to paint-by-numbers yourself into the walking, breathing Willie Horton of your private nightmares and public scorn, without remorse or pity or sorrow, utterly non-responsible for the prejudices and stereotypes you regurgitate and recycle about people you'll never want to know or need to respect because you can always regain your original ivory sheen with a quick shower and change of clothes. Call it transracial morphology. Jeremy Parker, Eminem's photo-negative, provides the sonic overlay for his Abercrombie & Fitch-sponsored Stepin' Fetchit block parties with forced humor, Al Jolson jacking off on the wheels of steel.

Jeremy Parker is a victim.

The antagonist is ego. President George W. Bush's ego will not allow the sensible retreat from the Iraqi butcher's bill the entire country desires. Michael Graham's ego forces him to weakly defend indefensible religious bigotry on mainstream media outlets like CNN's Newsnight with Aaron Brown in between second-round job interviews. Jeremy Parker's ego prevents him from begging the forgiveness of every Black person he meets for the remainder of his natural life. So these three upstanding American citizens embrace John McWhorter's Victimology to characterize their transgressions as steadfast leadership, counterculture insurgency, or good-natured fun. Notice the parallel to McWhorter's infamous attack upon the civil rights establishment: here, each individual Captain America redux expresses personal victimhood in public to exhort their constituencies - conservative Republicans, anti-Muslim neo-conservative reactionaries, and random White suburban college students - to embrace alienation from and resentment towards multicultural American liberalism, the cosmopolitan ideal of global peace through respectful international engagement (read: global trade) and domestic legal and social egalitarianism. The anti-war, Islam-tolerant, pro-Black Left requires of our nation a pluralistic inclusion these good 'ol boys despise, even when they realize their own cultural production atrophies as a result.

In truth, we're all left numb and unfeeling by current events. Anti-war protesters receive media coverage exponentially above and beyond their size and influence, but our soldiers still return home in flag-draped coffins its illegal to photo-document, or in IV-rigged hospital beds with major appendages conspicuously absent. Michael Graham's firing over his bigoted stance on Islam emerges as the best thing to happen to his career; the Right birthed a new media darling, Ann Coulter with lighter Revlon. And outside of a G-Unit beatdown replete with Young Buck's rusty shank, Jeremy Parker's "Kill Whitie" parties are too profitable to discontinue.

So we end where we begin. Powerless, de-democratized, barely conscious, eyes bloodshot, ears bleeding, awash in the disturbing decibels of white noise, we scratch and claw for the power to change our system, and go deaf in the process.

Who's the victim?

Update: The Pumpsta Speaks! Check the comments section for Mr. Parker's lame-ass excuse for his modern-day Jazz Singer parties. Also, if you haven't already, check out the esteemed HipHopMusic.com and Poplicks.com for more commentary on this foolish excuse for a hip hop fan.

For top-of-the-line deconstruction of The Pumpsta's idiocy, please check out Reappropriate.com. Angel knows what she's talking about.

Badunkadunk!

2005-08-25T13:00:00.000-07:00

Have you ever shopped at Lane Bryant?

As a child, I waited around beside my mother as she shopped rather often; I busied myself with some random Star Trek: The Next Generation novel or whatever while my mother gazed intently at racks of clothing I never understood or cared about. Never fashion conscious, never clothes savvy, I remember Mom inspecting row upon row of flowing formal dresses and boxy 1980's super shoulder working wear, all to display the proper synergy of omniscience and benevolence to poor rural fifth graders in Isle of Wight County, VA who still remember her as the first person in their lives who made education important, who made learning matter. My mother, is a teacher. Looking back, I don't remember my mother shopping for herself very often; most of her elementary school teacher's paycheck evaporated in order to feed and clothe and care for me and my niece, and to pay bills with my father. I wish my mother would have treated herself more.

At any rate, when she looked for a new dress or blouse, among other places my mother shopped at Lane Bryant. So I remember walking around the nearby store in Greenbrier Mall, Chesapeake, Virginia, at ages five and eight and ten, after time spent in Sears or electronic boutique. In case you've never heard of it, Lane Bryant is a store for 'plus size' women. The franchise's website describes the company as "the fashion leader in women's plus-size clothing, sizes 14-28". As memory serves, my mother spent her hard-earned paycheck in Lane Bryant because she always felt that along with attractive fashion and decent prices, Lane Bryant exuded respect for larger women as the overall tone and philosophy of their stores. In recent years, celebrities like Queen Latifah and Camryn Manheim have appeared in Lane Bryant advertisements; they promote healthy, beautiful women with style and glamour in the public sphere who don't need to squeeze into size 2 denim to feel human. I've always found Lane Bryant to be a respectable company.

A few weeks back, Angel (happy birthday, sweetie!) and I walked through an unbelievably large mall in New Jersey that had a Lane Bryant store. I wouldn't have noticed the shop at all because of my childish rush to locate the LEGO store, but in the Lane Bryant window was this picture:

Her name is Kimberley Locke, and she is fine. Obviously. Just look: the picture screams confidence, style, and warmth, not to mention extreme beauty. An open, graceful smile, a generally cheery attitude, and an all-killer-no-filler body left me dumbstruck, craning my neck as we passed by the store. (Mind you - I was walking with Angel, arm-in-arm; and I never notice other women, on the street, in advertisements, anywhere. No one pays me enough to commit suicide. ) Ms. Locke, a longtime singer and former American Idol contestant, is the new national spokeswoman for Lane Bryant's Seven7 Jeans, and currently tours to promote the clothing line. What I admire most about the pictures I've seen from her tour is how respectable the clothing frames her shape. It's never sluttish, always classy. She looks good.

I've never found beauty in a 'plus size' woman odd. The Black suburban community where I was raised was saturated with big, beautiful, Black women, who synthesized style and grace and class with inhuman ease. Street level Black culture has always respected larger women, in my opinion, out of necessity, to a greater degree that mainstream America. Of course, everyone is exposed to the dismaying pages of Cosmopolitan and People magazines, and Black women do accrue layered and complex body image concerns because of mainstream media input and internal Black male misogyny. Black men's stereotypical preference for lighter, Whiter women congeals a color complex our greatest minds have never quite excised from the darker nation's Y chromosomes. Still, growing up, larger women were always presented as healthy - to reasonable degrees; anyone who eats healthy foods and exercises regularly is generally healthy there, whether weighing in at 110, 150, or 180 pounds or fitting size five, seven, nine, or fourteen clothing. Please note, when I speak of the 'larger' Black woman, I refer to women who are of more mass than the mainstream White female beauty ideal marketed by American fashion and movie and print and medical industry media, nothing more. Examples? Lisa Nicole Carson instead of Calista Flockhart. Serena Williams instead of Anna Kournikova. Raven-Symone instead of Hilary Duff. It's not hard to figure out.

Hell, even all of the patently anti-woman audiovisual dogma hip hop produces daily reflects in some respects these communal African American origins. Your average rap video on the disgrace-to-the-race Black Entertainment Television from Ludacris or Snoop Dogg or Lil' Jon features women too voluptuous to shop in Abercrombie & Fitch or The Gap or American Eagle. The trendy SoHo boutique I pass by every day to travel to work features clothing that would be lost on video vixens like Ki Toy Johnson or Buffie the Body. Sure, Kanye West and David Banner will feature shapely Black women bobbing and weaving and bouncing and shaking their softer parts on camera to please men, without concern for sexist implications of the softcore corporate pornography they produce to sell rap records; this is as undeniable as it is unhealthy. However, all the 'bitch and ho' rhetoric notwithstanding, hip hop as a musical culture patently rejects the hillbilly heroin chic the rest of America injects daily.

Conversely, you're much more likely to find the Ying Yang Twins or Ice Cube or Twista fantasizing in rhyming couplets on the divine nature of round, brown posteriors and thick, rich sepia thighs. BET's Uncut shows practically nothing but booty videos of all budgetary proportions where Black women shake, rattle, and roll their asses as if their lives and your libido depended on it. Your average Black male rap fan probably has a mental list of favorite hip hop ass videos he can recite at will. If you care, the top of my list was once a tossup between Tupac's "I Get Around" and Dr. Dre's "Nuthin' But a G Thing", but then I saw Nelly's "E.I. (Tip Drill Remix)", produced by David Banner. Ass and breasts and thongs, oh my! I was twelve again - hormonal and horny and home alone. Without warning, MTV's favorite St. Lunatic ran an African American Express through a Black woman's bootycheeks, which she shook with capitalistic glee before unblinking 3 AM voyeurs nationwide. Ghetto Approved!

I know its wrong to like that video; I know that six minute celluloid oppresses women with it's very existence. But damn! Did you see that ass? Hey, I'll go to hell long before I reach Spelman, so I can understand Spelman's female protests of his presence. Nelly's "E.I. (Tip Drill Remix)" is unclean Black hedonism, degrading our race's morality every time its played. The visceral pleasure one derives from such a display devolves the African American woman - regal, intellectual, invulnerable - to your local automatic teller machine. And I'm beyond caring. Think about it: on some level, hip hop realizes it oppresses and dehumanizes women for corporate music's profit, and has already moved beyond therapy for those continued transgressions. Hip hop is anti-woman, yet its most feminist contributions still include a healthy support of and love for female forms of multiple sizes. Remember, the one plus size actress mainstream America cares about today - Queen Latifah - is a hip hop original.

Therein lies the paradox of hip hop misogyny - more than any other form of popular modern music, hip hop earns derision and disrespect for its infantile Neanderthal behavior toward women. In word and deed and mind, from every casual 'bitch' epithet to every scantily-clad half-naked video vixen to Dr. Dre slapping Dee Barnes to Tupac's conviction for sexual battery to Eminem's audio Abu Gharib of every one of his important female family members older than age ten to Lil' Kim's hypersexual clitoris rap to Kimberly Jones' plastic surgery to XXL's requisite Eye Candy photo pages to King magazine's presence as a low-budget rip-off Black man's Maxim to all hip hop pimp/player/mack references to the absence of any lyrically respected and commercially successful Black female emcees to hip hop's unneeded machismo homophobia, declaring any woman unwilling to wear dental floss and translucent gauze from Baby Phat on 106 & Park to promote her new album a butch lesbian - hip hop hates women. Yet the healthiest body imagery pop culture displays in reference to female size and weight can be found in hip hop. Men are more likely to appreciate larger, more realistic female physical shapes if they are exposed to hip hop influences and celebrities. Hell, Jennifer Lopez taught all of White America in the late Nineties that having a plump posterior was sexy and desirable- an obvious fact hip hop helped her market. Props to Sir Mix a Lot as well; mainstream Ivy League fraternity brothers still base 1991's "Baby Got Back" at their parties. They dance, drunkenly and off beat, with the skinniest, palest, flattest bottle blonds you can imagine, but they're with the brothers in spirit.

Fashion runways from New York to Paris promote the underfed and Teutonic as Nature's highest specimens of beauty and culture while reality television and pop music style Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson into America's beloved idiot princesses, mindless prodigies in wealth and glamour who laugh and sing and prance and fuck for public enjoyment and private mirth, beloved and adored by all as perfectly manicured humanoid mannequins, lithe and lifelike, posable and disposable, present-day permutations of a Victorian ideal outdated and repressive in it's own era. Meanwhile, you need a hip hop video to find a woman over one hundred fifty pounds displayed as attractive or desirable or sexy -- and not 'fat person sexy', but just sexy. Jill Scott. Floetry. Deborah Cox. Faith Evans. Kelly Price. Missy Elliott. True, the last two did lose a lot of weight publicly, but I recall brothers from my hometown of Portsmouth, VA commenting on how good Missy's thighs looked in more recent videos. When's the last time a red-blooded American White boy wanted to fuck Renee Zellweger?

Maybe it's a Southern thang, a cultural holdover and modern phenomenon resultant from slavery's fatty impact on soul food, or the modern impact of ever-worsening New South obesity trends, that explains African America's easygoing support for and love of larger women. The bulk of Black America still lives in the Southern states and composes, in part, the poorest, fattest American populations; those more likely to eat fast food three or more times a week, shop at big-box stores like Wal-Mart or Sam's Club or Costco, consume large portions of fried, fatty, greasy food at buffet style restaurants like Golden Corral, and barbeque more red meat than a Colorado rancher's convention are Southern Blacks. A leading risk factor for hypertension, high blood pressure, and heart disease, obesity, in the Black community, is older than our Negro spirituals, but the often unsung corollary is that positive body image among us is just as ancient. Again, I believe this occurs from necessity - the matriarchal Black community possessed voluminous examples of assertive, aggressive, intelligent, efficient Black women, who get things done and don't take no stuff, just like their mothers and their mother's mothers. Being put down over size is not, on the macro level, an option for these women. They are too busy working.

Apple pie Americana could use a double helping of fried chicken feminism.

(Shout outs to Crunk & Disorderly and Solitare Redux for Lil' Kim and Raven-Symone links.)

Public Safety

2005-08-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

Pamela Anderson spoke last night on Larry King. I didn't watch. America's latest Schwarzenegger immorality play explodes across our living room high definition televisions each evening, regurgitating familiar Iraqi sand and suffering. American meatloaf nights shudder sporadically with the sudden impacts of insurgent car bombs that maim and dismember and kill the brave and the bold and lonely maternal interrogatives that whine and cry and question the idle and the corporate. Sadly, one recalls the "Mission Accomplished!" photo-op phantasmagoria of May 1, 2003 with mute horror, as we watch The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer for John Madden-esque play-by-play of a Hollywood war movie sequel doubly sinister given the obvious, blatant lies we told ourselves to enter the theater and the horrible, malicious truth that won't let us leave during the previews.

No Iraqi Constitution can stop an insurgent's bullet, improvised explosive device, or dirty bomb. Our current international debate, argued in men and material, over whether to allow evil dictators to control their nations with iron impunity while isolating their realm's international impact, or to remove enemy combatant heads of state from power through costly martial means will ultimately have one ground zero result for the American people -- weak national security. The very concept of domestic safety within American borders is ludicrous: the country that produced Eric Rudolph and Eric Harris, the nation responsible for Dennis Rader and Timothy McVeigh, can never be safe.

We don't know what safe is.

Think about it: the geopolitical concerns of free trade and unfree labor, of open borders and international law, are not understood or even reflected on by the average American. To survive, we consume energy and produce waste; more than simple biology, our base needs dictate our national political psychology, which is why no one really cares about Cindy Sheehan. Without quoting Hobbes, I submit that the real reason America routinely involves itself in destructive, lethal, utterly wasteful wars without justice is that we tend to forget our own impotence.

The United States of America represents the pinnacle of human civilization on Planet Earth. We are the ideal. People the world over endure journeys of unbelievable sacrifice and hardship just for the chance to pick our oranges, wash our dishes, mow our lawns, drive our cabs, and study our sciences. Everyone wants to come here, even in our worst moments -- the enduring American freedom is the belief that here, more than anywhere else, the individual is truly master of his or her own fate. Not class, nor race, nor religion or gender, not station of birth, or family ties, or anything you can think of can hold you back, so the myth goes. Recently, I've desired nothing more than to see this nation through the warm, worn, determined brown eyes of an immigrant, a person whose stake in American success emerges as a voluntary choice rather than a lifelong fact. For the American native, born into privileged citizenship, America is very much a self-defined propaganda, always lacking the substance of voluntary commitment unless one makes the extra effort to discern what America really means to them. Nothing is more annoying in the modern American political commentary than the right-wing character assassins who decry illegal immigration as if it presents the single greatest clear and present danger to American welfare and security since Russia got the bomb. In Tucson, Arizona where I left Angel, hatred of Mexican immigrants was more common than hundred degree afternoons, drunken co-eds, and low-cut tank-tops on middle-aged bottle-blond mothers. For the Michelle Malkin's and Lou Dobbs' among us, illegal immigration allows lawlessness and aids terrorism, while castrating the law-abiding American middle class who wish nothing more than to work hard at jobs that pay wages decent enough to support Christian families and send good-natured, God-fearing children to college.

But that's not really possible in George W. Bush's America. The middle class is being squeezed, Twenty-First Century terrorism contributes to investor anxiety, gas prices are higher than Bill Maher snorting coke off Ann Coulter's shaven pubic mound at midnight on Libe Slope at our alma mater, Cornell University, metropolitan police departments routinely violate personal civil liberties at subway stations, and poverty still cripples millions of American children -- way more than Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas ever will. The point? The alpha nation in human history has yet to feed all its hungry, protect all its citizens from sudden, unprovoked attack, secure energy sources that don't annihilate the natural environment, ensure all its workers a living wage, or refrain from attacking individual rights to manipulate public fear. We are not only the best, we are the best that ever was. And we are failing.

America is impotent.

Yet, like all suffers of erectile dysfunction, or ED (thanks Sen. Dole!), America doesn't like to remember its condition. Sure, the temporary Cialis of tax cuts and reality television allows the American body politic quiet orgasms, fleeting moments of Jessica Simpson mind-numbing stupidity, but our blissful ignorance never persists as long as we'd like. We may be the ideal, but we are far from enlightened, and our false Nirvana shatters with every breaking news casualty report and front line tragedy. What is the war in Iraq but an arctic reality shower? Fox News can massage and manipulate and propagandize news from the front until Donald Rumsfeld resembles Angelina Jolie and Operation Iraqi Freedom will still be what it always has been -- the kind of mistake that gets men killed.

We are the brightest, and we have yet to learn to live without war. We are the greatest, and we spend more time, energy, and money on ending life than preserving life. We are the Omega -- and we still make mistakes we cannot fix where people die. When our CEO President reminds us reminds us how much we enjoy vile, depraved human conflict by scaring us all into frothy rabid fervor our myopic national lenses focus on the supposed good we can perform abroad, and no one seriously considers poverty, education, health care, and the economy. We convince ourselves to believe the Mattel President's prepared speech about mushroom clouds on American soil because of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and send our young people to die by fire under a Fallujan sun. We call this patriotic, but this quest for pure lies and soiled truths sacrifices more than our sons and daughters in Iraq.

We are losing the American soul.

The founding myth of individual virtue atrophies under an Administration more concerned with bike riding with Lance Armstrong than adequate protective gear for American troops. Our leader forsakes the crippling economic concerns of millions of Americans who depend on the internal combustion engine to support themselves and their families, yet finds the time to question evolution's validity and oppose both embryonic stem-cell research and homosexual marriage while American students lab behind much of the civilized world in science and math. In the meantime, rising scientific and industrial powerhouses like China and India threaten to surpass American superpower hegemony before Paris Hilton's dermatologist finds her first wrinkle. President George W. Bush annihilates American self-determination fanaticism in favor of totalitarian control from an anti-intellectual, quasi-corporate, reactionary Christian theocracy formerly known as the Grand Old Party.

Individuality can not exist in a world where everyone either thinks alike, or is too afraid of man and God to speak difference. All we teach the young in today's America are binary numerals. "You're either with us, or with the terrorists." "We fight the terrorists abroad, so we don't have to fight them at home." "Marriage is a union between a man and a woman." "Dead or alive." 011100110001. The price of nonconformity with the New Republican Order is social ostracism and political irrelevance. No Democrat on the national stage of any stature opposes the fundamental Bush doctrine of military intervention on a President's gut instinct alone, regardless of oppositional intelligence, absent post-war planning, unabashed war profiteering and graft, and the unfinished war or terror. The Bush Administration dismembers the reputations of all those who stand against the President, even former counterterrorism operatives, career diplomatic and civil service personnel, and grieving mothers of war dead; the result is a public that rejects difference and reason and embraces authority and control. Mind you, we are not yet Borg, but resistance should not become futile on our watch. It's not as if passive silence keeps America safe anyway.

Porcelain Goddesses

2005-07-29T08:37:00.000-07:00

I am not an attractive man. Never in my life has anyone complimented me as a 'pretty boy', a 'fine brother', or even 'hot'. Angel, no doubt, would disagree with this assessment, and while I always appreciate her attempts at ego-stroking when the subject of my physical attractiveness arises, I realize she's humoring me, on some level. She loves me. But Orlando Bloom, Dean Cain, and Hayden Christensen will always do more for her primal on-sight sexual urges than I ever will. This does not bother me, mind you. I know I am not an attractive man.

Given this, for me the eternal American quest for beauty strikes me as a puzzle wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma, for want of a better metaphor outside of Oliver Stone classics. For this writer, the human body should only be maintained at peak performance, mentally and physically. Manipulation of the human form for personal interests is for me, wrong. Many people over the years have asked why I don't smoke, drink alcohol, or use drugs, and the answer has always been the same - I don't believe in personal alteration of the human biochemical form for personal interest purposes, recreational or otherwise, outside of basic health and wellness. Take a pill to fight diabetes? Cool. Take a pill to lose inhibitions at a rave? Not cool. But don't worry, my later-day Shields Anti-Scientologists! I don't proselytize.

I do wonder though, why the quest for beauty in this county enraptures women with higher frequency than men. I mean, I always thought of myself as 'not attractive'. That doesn't mean 'ugly'; rather, I realized early on that some people with certain features were considered by all concerned 'beautiful', and my wavy black hair, broad brown nose, thick lips, and predatory brow were not considered 'beautiful'. Little children are mean, spiteful creatures, but even during the worst of the teasing - when I could not stand any more open taunts on my Bubblicious lips, or my Hoover vacuum nostrils, or the barnyard qualities of my last name - I never wanted to change myself. I was me. The entire concept of physical alteration to please others (who never have any incentive to like you no matter how many answers on math tests you let them steal) never made sense to me, and never will.

No one in modern American history better personifies the dangers inherent in changing yourself to please the masses than the greatest entertainer alive, Michael Jackson. From humble, modest rhythm and blues child prodigy to harried, reviled infamous pop laughingstock, Jackson engenders all types of angry, acidic commentary from African Americans insulted by his surgical manipulation of his African features into the acquitted Euro-terrestrial he presents today, but one wonders how universal Jackson's detractors would be had the entertainer settled on a particular look early on, and never went under the knife again. For example, if Michael Jackson today looked the spitting image of Michael Jackson on the cover of the Bad album, circa 1987, I truly doubt many Black folk would have much of a problem with him, which would mean that his singing career (dependent on mainstream appropriation of African American pop cultural tastes) would be in a much healthier state. The point? When people become enraged on a racial level about individual ethnic minorities who choose to pursue beauty through plastic surgery, designed by Western medicine to promote Western attitudes of beauty to all consumers (read: universal Whiteness by popular demand) they often ignore the more fundamental point - in a human environment based upon free choice, manipulation of the physical form to affect personal perceptions of beauty is as wrong as manipulation of chemical substances to affect personal perceptions of bliss. Botox is America's newest crack.

Today, after reading a new article on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's abandonment of the extreme Left (registration required) for centrist Democratic electability, I read in the Los Angeles Times an article about Asian American women who use skin whitening techniques and treatments to preserve and promote lighter, whiter skin. First, I was afraid. Then I was petrified. "Beauty and the Bleach", by Jia-Rui Chong, describes the quest of some Asian American women to "preserve or enhance their pale complexions with expensive creams, masks, gloves, professional face scrubs and medical procedures". For me, this manner of body manipulation is far past repugnant, way beyond disgusting. It's rather inhuman.

From the article:

For many Southern Californians, summer is the season for beaches, chaise longues and the quest for the perfect tan.

Not for Margaret Qiu. She and thousands of other Asian American women are going to great lengths to avoid the sun - fighting to preserve or enhance their pale complexions with expensive creams, masks, gloves, professional face scrubs and medical procedures.

For these women, a porcelain-like white face is the feminine ideal, reflecting a long-held belief that pale skin represents a comfortable life. They also believe it can hide physical imperfections.

"There's a saying, 'If you have white skin, you can cover 1,000 uglinesses,' " said Qiu, a 36-year-old Chinese immigrant who lives in Alhambra.

Qiu goes through a regimen of skin-whitening products twice a day. She is one of many customers who have turned Asian whitening creams and lotions into a multimillion-dollar industry in the United States.

But that's just the beginning.

Take a daylight drive through Asian immigrant enclaves like Monterey Park and Irvine, and you'll see women trying to shield themselves with umbrellas - even for the short dash from a parking lot into a supermarket. While driving, many wear special "UV gloves" - which look like the long gloves worn with ball gowns - to protect their forearms, and don wraparound visors that resemble welder's masks.

At beauty salons, women huddle around cosmetics counters asking about the latest cleansers and lotions that claim to control melanin production in skin cells, often dropping more than $100 for a set. Beauticians do a brisk business with $65 whitening therapies. Women dab faces with fruit acid, which is supposed to remove the old skin cells that dull the skin, and glop on masks with pearl powder or other ingredients that they believe lighten the skin.

There are doctors who, for about $1,000, will use an electrical field to deliver vitamins, moisturizers and bleaching agents to a woman's face in a procedure known as a "mesofacial."

Whitening products have been a mainstay in Asia for decades, but cosmetics industry officials said they have emerged as a hot seller in the United States only in the last four years. Whitening products now rack up $10 million in sales a year, according to the market research firm Euromonitor.

But their popularity has sparked a debate in the Asian American community about the politics of whitening. Qui and others say the quest for white skin is an Asian tradition. But others - younger, American-born Asians - question whether the obsession with an ivory complexion has more to do with blending into white American culture, or even a subtle prejudice against those with darker skin.

The market research firm says cosmetics companies have taken note of the sensitivity, saying their Asian skin products in America are intended not for "whitening" but for "brightening."

"It's not a politically correct term because it seems to imply that looking Caucasian via a white complexion is the desired beauty goal," said Virginia Lee, a Euromonitor analyst.

The money alone freaks me out. To spend so much just to turn one's skin a certain color is for me, ridiculous. But outside of the monetary concern, the moral question must be raised: is changing your skin tone to possess the intangible concept of 'beauty' ever positive? Must a pursuit of the good life include the social benefit of Whiteness in American society? In the post-politically correct Bush Administration, can a nation that promotes pale, white complexions as more desirable than other epidermal tones simultaneously promote individual self-worth as an ideal of the good citizen? The answers are not obvious. Margaret Qiu contributes to an American industry based upon the exultation of Eurocentric physical forms as the epitome of beauty; to consider her actions justifiable, one would have to argue either that the pursuit of any beauty ideal is in itself not harmful, or that skin-whitening products, surgeries, and techniques do not desecrate personal self-worth or the physical form in any way. I do not believe that a person can reasonably argue such perspectives.

When Nicole Kidman is placed upon the hegemonic Western world as a pinnacle of female beauty, we tell every woman in our diverse civilization that if you don't look like her, you are not attractive. Then we let Cosmopolitan and other publications convince women that they are truly ugly. Either they are too fat, too wrinkled, too dark, too short, too tall, too wide, or too weird. Their hair doesn't have that special stringy neo-Neanderthal straightness, or their posteriors are too prominent. Their teeth are too crooked or their feet are too big. Their breasts sag too naturally, or they have breasts larger than a nine-year-old Jesus juice-oholic. Their skin is too blemished, or their skin is too dark.

Recently, I engaged in an online dick-waving contest with renowned armchair feminist Fromaway over the role of modern feminism in a diverse, multiracial female population. One would think that the feminist implications of skin-whitening creams used by Asian American women would be obvious for feminist groups; Reappropriate.com has an amazing post on this very article that examines some of these issues. Still, I don't believe that many prominent feminists would take up a cause like this. Writers like Catherine MacKinnon are helpful public intellectuals when attacking the role of pornography in the lives of Americans, or fighting to cement rape as a crime against humanity in international law, but when people of color enter the room, American feminists must grapple with both the exclusionary racist past of the women's suffrage and feminist movements, as well as modern mainstream American indifference (especially on the Left) to an Eurocentric beauty ideal that places White women (again!) at the center of the debate. Call it the 'Cosmo complex'; the omnipresent, omni-suggestive deluge of skinny, airbrushed, Caucasoid video vixens found in all facets of media production, from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, to Maxim-esque lad mags, to local weathergirls on the evening news, to Las Vegas showgirls, to Nicole Kidman and Angelina Jolie, to Hugh Hefner's Playboy, to the Bush twins, to Ann Coulter, to Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, to Laguna Beach, to the Real World, to practically every issue of People or Time or Newsweek, or any rap video you've ever seen, to any porno flick you've ever watched, to any popular chick from high school or college you've ever hated, dated, needed to murder or wanted to befriend or needed to become.

Think about it: all American women and men are constantly exposed to the White female beauty ideal. This damages all of us, certainly all women, but I would contend that all of us are not assaulted identically. Men pursue sexually who they think they will be successful with, but a majority of men (regardless of race, unfortunately) attempt White females because of the longtime social programming we all endure. The oft-used Waiting to Exhale contention that successful Black men validate their professional and financial success by dating and marrying White women (any White women, no matter how not attractive) to African American women's exclusion in a perverse status symbol conflux of racist, sexist, and classist attitudes is a reasonable and fact-based contention. Women of color, suffering under this Cosmo complex, are constantly told not that they are just 'not attractive' but rather that they are ugly, unwanted, and condemned to be either alone or subjected to the misogynistic whims of minority men given license by society to engage whatever sexist practices they devise. Domestic violence, extra-marital promiscuity, economic control, forced domesticity, sexual retardation - whatever men of color do, however repulsive, is permissible on some level beyond the usual Wilt Chamberlain, R. Kelly, Sean Michaels hypersexual natural porn star stereotypes because freedom of choice in sexual coupling is in a very real sense denied to women of color by the Cosmo complex. When most men look towards Ashley Judd or Kirsten Dunst as attractive, the chick walking by looking like Jill Scott or India Arie really doesn't have a chance in the dating pool. D.L. Hugley once joked in his amazing 1999 stand-up comedy special Goin Home that he couldn't move to Africa under any circumstances. "I need a woman with a perm, fuck that!" Indeed.

Given this backdrop, Asian American and Latin American women (and lighter-skinned African American women, in my opinion) are placed in unique and interesting circumstances, similar but not identical to the social phenomena of racial passing. They absorb all Cosmo complex programming like the rest of us, but given equalizing factors like language proficiency, education level, and mainstream social immersion, a certain transracialization may occur whereby the Latina or Asian American woman may choose to assimilate to the point where the Cosmo complex works for her, rather than impedes her sexual chances. Still, in street-level race relations, so much personal choice surrenders to commonplace racist and sexist attack from misogynist men of all shades that most women never meaningfully choose their relation to the Cosmo complex. The point? Whatever internal cultural reasons that may preference lighter skin in some Asian American cultures, the physical adherence to those cultural mores has a mainstream political impact in our domestic American sphere, one that not only reinforces and justifies a generally oppressive social phenomena, but also provides chances for upward mobility through a possible cultural synchronicity that many conservative Republican proponents of 'model minority' stereotypes of Asian Americans and Latino assimilation into Republican Party religious conservativism may exploit. In essence, skin-whitening emerges as a reverse blackface flattery White America can't help but support.

Skin-whitening creams degrade individuality and demote uniqueness to promote monotone conformity to a ruling class defined in part by racial classification and general European genetic heritage. In the African American community, skin-whitening creams have a painful, sad history, filled with chemical burns, disfigurement, and the broken promise of passing. Better writers than I have assailed the degrading shame skin-whitening creams have wrought upon Black people; better writers attacked the pathetic clamors and petty morality of those hoping to end skin-deep Blackness with daily application. Still, I find this trend among middle-aged Asian American women particularly troubling because it emerges as a photo-negative of an entrenched trend among college-educated, youthful Asian American women - tanning. The forty and fifty plus Korean mothers who avoid sunlight like the vampire Lestat from Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire exhibit no higher moral principle than their twenty-something Cornell alumni daughters who visit tanning salons regularly to preserve that special coastal burn during the unending December of Ithaca's winters with patently unhealthy ten to twenty minute bursts of ultraviolet radiation, just to compete with Sandy and Kimber and Bethany for the sweaty, impromptu, Heineken-saturated animal attentions of homoerotic Captain America-wannabe frat brethren during the wet T-shirts and forgotten phone numbers of Cancun's drunken debauchery. Both groups engage in dangerous alteration of their natural, original epidermal state to gain mainstream White approval in some respect; I never met anyone who consciously tanned their skin because they wanted to achieve an unorthodox look.

Tanning and chemical whiteface flip double consciousness past application; try as we might, African Americans can not promote the eternal reflection of DuBois' American Negro upon individuals whose conscious attempts at transracial uniformity with the dominant racial classification defy the logic of both conservativism's rugged individualism and liberalism's cosmopolitan multiculturalism. The twenty-one year old female Asian American chemical engineer can no more proclaim her uniqueness from the tanning bed's claustrophobic solar flares than her middle-management microchip manufacturer mother can boast her culturally diverse, equal opportunity Arlington, Virginia workplace as a positive arena for minority retention and achievement. But of course, neither person would proclaim anything from such positions. Hell, African Americans don't sell double consciousness to every colored American they find, even on college campuses. No one cares that much. Instead, we expect the worst from one another to feel the pain less when others prove us right. The eternal quest for racial transcendence remains more a mental war than a social conflict, as Americans always prefer to judge with smiling, silent, clenched teeth than to dialogue with sharp, contentious, honest tongues.

Chino XL once described Mariah Carey as "Black when it's convenient"; one could apply his apt commentary to a celebrity like Jennifer Lopez, who seems to rediscover her Bronx-born Puerto-Rican heritage with every new album release. The important responsibility though, is that in a world where political affiliations, personal morality, and even outward racial classification has become Industrial Light & Magic smoke and mirrors masquerade for so many, those who develop and possess defined self-identities, racial and otherwise, speak openly on themselves and their experiences, so that the distance between reality and fantasy remains meaningful enough to matter. I do not believe in any sense that all Asian American women desire Whiteness; rather, I am troubled by women of color who so desire to prove racial solidarity for whatever reasons that they embrace physical self-desecration to achieve beauty. When light-skinned African American women tan, or wear natural hairstyles to 'prove' Blackness to their peers, I am similarly nauseated. I don't inspect every Black person's African American Express card with Kanye West's egotistical visionary squint on the face.

We've entered an epoch in American race relations where semiotics may overpower common sense, and we should all remain wary of these consequence through knowledge and personal analysis. In today's Washington Post, Roban Givhan's intriguing article Warning: Killer Curves in Spandex offers a take on the racial/ sexual signifier phenomena that's worth reading. Because in a world where women try to achieve both that particular shade of facial white (sickly bone White Michael Jackson looks 'terrible' according to Margaret Qiu) and try to affect in K Street offices that particular blend of cheeky hip-thrusting, bouncing bottom, and Juggs-magazine voluptuousness, everyone needs to recall their original sociopolitical positions. The medium can define us, especially when we relinquish our creative control over our various identities to mainstream groupthink. Once the Cosmo complex exerts control, you're already more cosmetic than corporeal.

Maybe you're Maybelline.

The Desert of the Real

2005-07-17T03:45:00.000-07:00

Recently, ABC announced it was canceling Welcome to the Neighborhood, a highly publicized reality show revolving around a close-knit, conservative Republican cul-de-sac in Austin, Texas, where white families decide which of seven different families, one African American, one Hispanic, one Korean American, one Wiccan, one White homosexual couple (with an adopted African American baby), one White couple covered in tattoos and piercings, and another White family where the mother is employed as a stripper, are allowed to move in to the 3,300 square foot home on their block. No, I'm not making this up. Obviously the producers of this show never heard of housing discrimination laws.

Designed to be a mid-summer replacement for Desperate Housewives, ABC seems to have desired a mix between busybody suburban intrigue and identity politics reality television. Honestly, I'm going to scour the ‘Net until I locate an episode or two of this travesty against humanity. Ever since Kevin Powell telecast his African American Studies-influenced belief that "Black people can't be racist!" to that poor little White girl on the very first season of MTV's The Real World, the easiest and most effective manner to boost reality television ratings has been through racial conflict. Omarosa Manigualt Stallworth became a household name on The Apprentice through Mark Burnett's manipulation of her every waking moment into the most sinister Black villain since Denzel Washington in Training Day. Sly Stallone's The Contender briefly flirted with middleweight boxer Ishe Smith as tall, dark, and psychotic. And the litany of Negroes without sanity that have muddled through close-quarters interaction with our Girls Gone Wild mainstream White Americana on MTV's The Real World continues to blossom, even after the sad passing of show creator Mary-Ellis Bunim. Just ask Karamo.

Hell, I did. Angel and I met him briefly at a panel discussion on reality show treatment of homosexuality a few months back; I was mainly struck by the illogical star power and minor celebrity anyone who has been on television exudes to people who have not had to ignore cameras while performing basic hygiene rituals. Karamo was a regular Black man. Nothing more. I did not agree with his perceptions on Real World race relations, but was pleasantly surprised by his openness on the subject. Honestly, we disagreed on one major premise: my belief that the producers of reality shows like the pioneering Real World mine racial conflict for ratings success, yet strongly encourage the participants (through skillful post-production editing) to "solve" their racial conflicts in ways that encourage the usually sheltered, usually suburban, usually White protagonists to embrace ideals of tolerance and open-mindedness. Essentially, the minorities are allowed on reality TV shows as villainous race foils, all in an effort to evolve average White folk into Better People.

How often is the personal growth of one individual White person the major plotline of a reality television season? Easily the most extreme example of this production choice was The Real World: New Orleans, when Julie Stoffer, a lifelong Mormon and student at Brigham Young University, joined at age twenty-one the ninth season of seven strangers picked to live in a house and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start getting real. (Damn, I really can't believe I just wrote that from memory. Sad.) Most episodes revolved around her Bambi-eyed outlook on the fast-paced world around her, where homosexuals lived just down the hall from her room, and racial interaction assistance abounded. She was once admonished on-camera by mixed-race cast member Melissa Howard and African American cast member David Broom on the negative connotations of the pejorative 'colored' as acceptable terminology for African Americans. During the Clinton Administration. Seriously. Julie, as bubbly, semi-attractive (by majority standards), holier-than-thou Abercrombie girl, swam in oceans of air time that season as she discovered American diversity for the first time, for someone else's viewing pleasure.

Definitely not mine; my demographic does not overlap with the suburban, White, middle-class, 18-25 MTV target audience enough to prevent such callous misuse of race color for White benefit. Countless times in that season, Melissa or David or Danny, the openly gay cast member, sat with Julie for some heart-to-heart with string quartet accompaniment, where they tried to indoctrinate her past her homespun, Utah-chiseled perspectives of devout spirituality and judgmental ethno-narcissism into the situational immorality of drunken MTV feelgood over-exuberance. New Orleans presented the perfect backdrop for Julie's conversion from 1950's stalwart conservatism to 1990's capricious liberalism; hedonism sweats, dances, moves, and simply plays better on television because it appears fun. At least it did when David Broom played into every hypersexed Mandingo stereotype imaginable with all of his omnipresent, interchangeable females running around. After David, Black male sexuality in reality television was as absentee as public outrage against Mexican President Vicente Fox and the new Memin Penguin stamps. Open dialogue is always preferable to closed door silence on racial issues, but dialogue does not end discrimination anymore than public speeches cease private prejudices.

We can't continue as Americans to arrogantly persist with the belief that by and large, we are decent people. We're not. Americans are selfish, manipulative, hedonistic, vice-addicted capitalists who derive profits and suffering from even the most holy, sacrosanct, and/ or mundane situations. Honestly, that's what makes reality television so appealing - the perverse American voyeur bred in all of us from our judgmental Mayflower origins loves to watch others dismember themselves and their reputations for his and his family's enjoyment. The reality of reality television exposes John Q. Public's unabashed desire for sacrificing his fellow Everyman to a warped third-person cannibalistic bloodsport Murderball where no one gets away clean and everyone walks away upset. Our modern day Purityrannicals deplore sex and violence in entertainment media without end, shout an ever deafening crescendo of holier-than-thou Parents Television Council hyperbole that drowns an entire nation of formerly free thinking individuals within conservative Christianity's muddy waters. Hell, even that capricious Clayface chameleon Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) cashed in her free choice credibility to appease the Orwellian Right. Memo to the junior Senator - no video game ever enticed me to have sex or shoot someone. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, one of the most technically detailed and patently fun video games ever made, is a hotbed of -ism imagery, resplendent with racial epithets, pimping, drive-bys, police brutality, terrorism, and other random criminal behavior. So is every major city in the United States! Try cleaning up the real urban blight before you FCC the fake one.

To escape, in perfect Peyton Place fashion, we pay away our shame to cable companies willing to supply starving immoral America with our popularity phantasmagoria, celeb-reality TV. To appease the salacious-starved masses, network executives greenlight shows dependent upon race conflict to provide ratings success. Given this backdrop, I'm not surprised that ABC planted its summer hopes upon Welcome to the Neighborhood: it's good business to lampoon the different and pink and yellow and brown and black for White audiences. The sad thing is that it works, on all of us. If Corporate America's water coolers could talk during the first season of The Apprentice, they would have related mainstream America's utter disgust for Omarosa; President Bush could have reverse-Jessica Lynched her into Iraq just to have another reason to invade. Omarosa Manigualt Stallworth, the perfect Black weapon of mass distraction, a bold, brazen Black woman blessed with too much sense and sensibility, refused to Stepin Fetchit for her White coworkers, and in doing so metamorphosed The Apprentice into the nation's number one minstrel show. It'd be tragic if it wasn't so pathetic.

But before someone asks me for a solution to the meat grinder of modern media output, here's my suggestion. Allow the most radical group of minority media commentators and pundits to produce their own reality show, given one unique and non-negotiable premise - the emotional and intellectual health, safety, and purity of White participants will not be preserved by anyone involved. No, I'm not looking for a season of Dave Chappelle's "The Mad Real World" produced by Ego Trip; I want a Real World where the next half naked barely legal American Eagle billboard who cries her eyes out about making jokes about Black people isn't given a calming piano interlude and a "hey, it's okay" group therapy session. Someone can just curse that little White girl out. I want a reality show where a obvious sorority distrust of a mild mannered hardworking sista is called racism, on camera, by the men who have nothing to gain. I want a reality show where the buxom, loud, boisterous, bottle blond with a penchant for starting public altercations when drunk can't escape responsibility for racial epithet usage through pyrotechnic crying over past sexual assault. I want a reality show where people work a manufacturing job for twelve hours a day, or come home from work smelling like French fries, low quality meat product, grease, and baby vomit. I want a reality show where a person with piercings and purple hair with hot pink highlights isn't a pariah. I want a reality show where the piss-drunk, blonde Muscle & Fitness squarejaw walking around threatening people with butcher's knives spends a night in jail for attempted assualt before his Jungle Fever episodes. I want a reality show where people can discuss current events without blind Britney Spears "The President is always right!" apathy. I want a reality show where feminism isn't reduced to wearing low-cut matching t-shirts eight sizes too small or street-level panty peep shows for twenty dollars American. I want a reality show where people pay their own fucking bills!

Anything that could toss the reality back into reality television would be welcome, thank you. America needs television it can relate to that doesn't play upon its worst instincts of race and sex oppression and exploitation to hold public interest. That way, when issues of individual difference emerge, people can work stuff out on equal footing, and editors won't need to massage footage into the Better People scenario. It's not impossible; CBS' landmark The Amazing Race provides fun episodes based upon themes everyone can relate to: competition, the wonders of exotic locales, and the frustration of modern travel. Plus, even when participants expose the 'ugly American' syndrome on camera (usually the privileged White chicks who get to African and Asian countries and complain about the language barrier or the local cuisine or the unabashed poverty ("It's so dirty here, why don't they just stop breeding?" - Christie) no one tries to propagandize racist liberal 'tolerance' to anyone. It just exists, and viewers can make their own conclusions.

So perhaps we should all become a little more mindful of the personal choice we still possess. Reality tv doesn't have to suck so badly; we can insist on shows that don't insult vast stretches of the American population to provide drama. Hell, given the choice, The Amazing Race is always preferable to anyone's Survivor, Apprentice, or Real World, for one major reason - it's the only reality show where Black people can win in the end. It's about time!

American Secession

2005-07-15T19:13:00.000-07:00

Red State, blue state
I hate, you hate....

Will Chief Justice Rehnquist retire? Will President Bush fire Karl Rove? Will Lex Luthor/ Brainiac achieve his plans of global domination on Justice League Unlimited?

These, and other pressing questions dominate today's political blogosphere, since we're so afraid of domestic terrorism that Desperate Housewives and Lance Armstrong are all that soothes the American beast. Hell, we're so angry these days, with the war, the Supreme Court, with abortion, with people who want to end legal abortion, that we could just spit. Or split, as it were.

Secession is always a bad idea.

Ann Coulter, speaking at our alma mater Cornell University, once expressed her support for modern succession; it never ceases to surprise me how eager the modern Left is to echo her sentiments. The Civil War decided the succession question: with more domestic American blood and sacrifice than has ever spilled since, our forefathers made the answer clear. No one just runs away from being an American just because they don't agree with the tyranny of the majority.

Further, the post-Election 2004 tongue-in-cheek Blue State departure complex always 'forgets' an important point: most African Americans live in the Red states of the American South. According to Census 2000 data, out of a total population of roughly two hundred eighty-one million Americans, 34,658,190 consider themselves Black or African American alone. Out of that thirty-four million, 18,981,692 reside in the South. That's 54.8% of Black America. Quoting the Census 2000 brief: "The South had the largest Black population, as well as the highest proportion of Blacks in its total population: 20 percent of all respondents in the South reported Black compared with 12 percent in the Northeast, 11 percent in the Midwest, and 6 percent in the West." Sixty-four percent of U.S. Counties (3,141 in all) are fewer than six percent Black, but ninety-six mostly Southern counties have populations that are more than 50% Black, St. Louis City, MO being the one non-Southern exception. The South is Black America; just look for yourself at this Census 2000 population map showing percentage of African Americans by county. Seeing is beliving, and Black is beautiful.

Since the obese, fundamentalist Christian, warmongering, poverty-stricken, unhealthy, tax revenue draining, uneducated, chickenhawk South contains the vast majority of Black people (many of whom oppose abortion, feminism, gay marriage, and most other current tenets of Northeastern liberalism while fanatically supporting the Democratic Party), it's kind of hard for me to understand why so many leftists are so eager to simply discard the very group that have been the most consistent and stalwart supporters of the Democratic Party. We know what we stand for; the equal opportunity and welfare state policies of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society, along with modern day support for affirmative action in education and employment, ally African Americans to the Democratic Party in droves. African Americans are socially conservative and economically liberal; they don't so much oppose Adam and Steve as they want Adam Smith to work for them. That's not to say that Black folk aren't homophobic: generally speaking, of course they are. But I believe Black homophobia operates much the same way as the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy of the Clinton Administration's Armed Forces - it offers no possibility of publicly recognized humanity or individualism, but allows one to do their job for the most part by shuffling along with head bowed and mouth shut.

The point? Even oppressed Black people never followed Marcus Garvey back to Africa en masse; what makes Northeastern liberals so hellbent on leaving? The mainstream African American community is too concerned with economic inequalities, voting rights violations, untenable internal crime rates, and astronomical STD infection to concern itself with physical political separation. Election 2004 was not a national divorce based on irreconcilable culture war differences. Legalized marijuana and socialized Starbucks do not replace the American Republic. Even polarized pseudo-pluralism is preferable to Vegan America. Latte liberalism does not convince the Democratic Party to embrace hybrid cars and sustainable living environmentalism; hell, Environmental Action can't convince the average person to dismember President Bush's Clear Skies Initiative (especially it's relaxed prohibitions against mercury pollution) without begging for money like homeless hobos hopped up on Thunderbird. Given this, why must my fellow liberals embrace despair and escape North in yet another paleface imitation of African American history?

Every leftist fringe philosophy or oppressed minority these days appropriates the Civil Rights Movement to justify its current gripes with the American system in ways that horrify African Americans, still locked out in 2005 of the institutions of power of our nation in large numbers. Token Blackness emerges all over, from the advanced placement classroom to the corporate boardroom to the White House Situation Room, but African Americans have no more increased their political clout today than during the Kennedy Administration. What has African American support for the Left benefited African Americans? Al Gore failed miserably to publicly discuss open and systematic elimination of African American voters from their constitutional rights during Election 2000, when it could have helped him. The Democratic Party rallies it's Black base during every election, but crime and poverty still ravage Black neighborhoods. Hell, every time the Democratic Party rolls over to support another savaging of the New Deal welfare state to appear conciliatory to conservative Republican voters, fewer tax dollars go to support failing public schools, Social Security, and properly equipped (and overseen) police departments.

Now the Left wants to leave Black people stuck in the Southern hellhole they've never cared for and helped create?

This 'letter', however sarcastic and humorous, is a perfect example of Northeastern liberalism run amuck. Moby's similar post-Election 2004 depression prompted a similar flirtation with secession, and the public face of the always antagonistic Move-On.org was just as incorrect. Maybe I just don't get the joke; I see nothing funny about the idea of trapping roughly nineteen million Black people in the poverty-stricken, faith-based bondage of President Bush's Holy Texan Empire. I suppose that the United Blue States of America will be some sort of leftist utopia: practically no race problem since most of the yellow, brown, and black people won't be there, where everything's all right, 'cause it's all White. Can you imagine the road signs?

"Welcome to the United States of Canada! Where everyone's White as the driven snow!"

Thanks to Sheldiz for posting the Craigslist letter on her blog.

Addendum: It just occurred to me that I missed a major point in this post. Real quick, the useful point expressed by the Craigslist letter is not satirical. The Democratic party has abandoned the South for the last twenty odd years of presidential elections. This "pseudo-Southern strategy", more than any other paternalistic liberal factor cements African Americans' political impotence within the Democratic party. What the Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Julien Bond need to do is convince Democratic strategists of a workable Southern strategy that could make use of the 34 million Black people who suffer through their lives with no political clout in either major party. Sure, many people have made these points more eloquently than I am now, but I took another look at the numbers and it really scared me.

Keystyle Rhymes

2005-07-07T17:43:00.000-07:00

It's morning in America, madam. Do you want more?
Good morning America, how about some hardcore?
Feminism's circumcision persists in hip-hop
Lil' Kim convicted of perjury, refused to talk shop
The sentence? One year and one day in jail,
The Shawshank? Platinum album sales.
Martha Stewart leaves the pen for her new reality show;
Being Bobby Brown redefines the phrase 'video hoe'.
It's His Prerogative! He coons when we want a coon.
It's Her Prerogative! Crack's whack but makes Whitney swoon.
Kaboom! Justice O'Connor ignites ideological schism,
Luther Vandross passed, R. Kelly recycles rhythm.
Just don't ask Terry McMillan about her next book deposit
Since everyone knows who Stella "Trapped in the Closet".
A million questions for this world, the truth you decide
Why does an Bob Dole need a Viagra sex drive?
Why does America cry when a White woman hides?
When did we go from Fab 5 Freddy to the Fab 5?
Since I don't wear pink, I ask clarification,
But I'm not a diamond in the rough, this isn't Late Registration.
No backpack rap singles, no Jacob the Jeweler exultation,
No conflict bling, no shallow sanctification.
Today we endure post-colonial phantom menace
Not Industrial Light and Magic's post-pubescent apprentice
Not a psychotic padawan with the bluest blue eyes
Just the irrepressible hate no Yoda can exorcise
But we don't stand up, protest, or even change the lies
We choose indifference, export freedom fries.
Disenfranchise billions and billions so profit margins rise.
Ronald's the best genocide your money can buy.
But globalization's feedback loop imports terror
The casualties of London make al-Qaida that much scarier.
No prior warning, no reservations for the innocent
No negotiations with illogical heretics hell-bent
On Western decimation. The clash of civilizations
Is mutually assured destruction, posthaste eradication.
Thirty-seven people reduced to ash and cinder cadavers.
Human sardines trapped in subterranean caverns,
Waiting to die. There's only fear and loathing in the West
We defend Vicki Vicodin from Cruise knows best.
Why be depressed, Brooke? So many luscious pills...
Voluptuous volumes of soma, negligible ills...
And what of the children? The walking dead
Apathetic, disaffected, The Massacre in their heads
Four million albums sold to America's future
Murder, misogyny, all in good humor -
But not really. For to be 50 Cent
Is to assassinate your fellow Blackman to pay rent.
Sniper sellout, uber-thug Thomas Sowell
Chromium melanin automaton like Colin Powell.
Marketing the unbearable lightness of blackface
To all those John McWhorter knows aren't Losing the Race
The mainstream forgets itself in the minority minstrel;
White men never miss Dave Chappelle on Comedy Central.
So send La Amistad to Durban
Disguise that brother in a turban
And tell Kunta "Season 3! Before the Christmas tinsel."

In Transit

2005-06-23T21:45:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to realize that I have no place in this great big white world.

On June 21, 2005, a jury found Edgar Ray Killen guilty of manslaughter in the deaths of the three young civil rights workers who disappeared exactly forty-one years prior in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In the deaths of Andrew Goodman, 20, James Earl Chaney, 21, and Michael Schwerner, 24, the eighty year old Killen was sentenced to sixty years in prison today, the maximum twenty year sentence for each manslaughter conviction. Supposedly, this can now bring justice, peace, and closure to an otherwise bloody stain upon the history an sacred honor of the South.

I am not impressed.

This latest of the Southern 'atonement trials' can perform no other task in my opinion, but justify the continued smugness and unceasing pride White liberals have in a criminal justice system that works, a day late and a dollar short, to prosecute the most stunning examples of White supremacist anti-heroism while the real antagonists to American racial harmony go unpunished, and often assume the highest offices in the land. George W. Bush, serving as Governor of Texas, presides over the state-sponsored murder of 134 men, and is considered a stalwart champion of law and order - so much so that as President of the United States, he orchestrates an unjust, illegal war against a sovereign nation that never attacked the United States of America that causes the deaths of over 1500 American servicemen and thousands of Iraqi citizens, while he wraps himself in the virtues of conservative Christianity and the so-called 'culture of life'. In our bizarro world, Terri Schiavo's life means more than anyone who perishes from hyperbolic, unchecked capitalism (read: poverty, there is no trickle down prosperity), readily spreading acquired immune deficiency syndrome, ever-expanding drug and gang crime, first and secondhand smoke, etc. But don't be alarmed fellow citizens, because Edgar Ray Killen, former Klansman, is guilty!

So Edgar Ray Killen is going to jail. This aged, weak, wheelchair bound man with green oxygen tubes dangling from his nose shall now enjoy his earthly twilight behind bars. I wonder, as property of the state, will the taxpayers of Mississippi have to pay Killen's hospital bills? Didn't anyone consider this before convicting him of manslaughter?

Manslaughter. Manslaughter! Are they joking? James McIntyre, one of Mr. Killen's lawyers, was quoted in The New York Times saying, "At least he wasn't found guilty of a willful and wanton act. Manslaughter is a negligent act." Jurors were reported as wanting to convict Killen of murder, but lacking the evidence to do so. With so many witnesses dead and people's memories fading, this case ends on a bittersweet note for me. We don't need another show trial in America to make the general public feel better about their individual capitalist drudgery. Instead of a media lynching as was apparent in the Michael Jackson trial, the Killen verdict and sentencing emerges as nothing more than an excuse for White people in general and White liberals in particular to feel better about their own modern prejudices. While riding the Metro-North from White Plains to Grand Central Station yesterday morning, I spied several middle-aged, balding, bespectacled White professionals and businessmen in grey or blue or black Brooks Brothers suits with I-Pod earphones dangling from their clean shaven, hygienic faces reading newspaper articles about the Killen case, with smiles, frowns, and everything in between. True, I don't know what these men were thinking, and I don't care. It really doesn't matter. The articles about the 'K-K-Killer!" octogenarian were all written with an air of barely controlled relief. America, better late than never, has punished the bad man who stole our innocence away. Problem solved. Racism is dead. God Bless America. The entire sorry episode appears nothing more than one general collective appeal to discard race animosity as a overused, impotent cliche, a immature, ill-evolved throwback without parallel in modern America. For the Metro-North, Killen's conviction is the final triumph of Northeastern White liberalism over the openly patriarchal, unapologetic race and sex and class stratification of the defeated Confederacy, retarded by its own insistence upon difference. In short, racism no longer exists, so the only racists left are elderly, sickly, disease-riddled bigots, aged Archie Bunkers whose angry rhetoric no one need listen to, and who separate-and-unequal ideals the world has passed by.

And yet, without a decent suit, fresh haircut, and total foot-shuffling silence, I appear out of place on this technoorganic transport to metropolitan marvels. Women clutch purses, eye me suspiciously. Men regard me with open contempt if I interrupt their activities to secure an open seat. All expect me to stand and depart at the Harlem-125th St. stop. I am not Ralph Ellison's nameless protagonist, nor am I invisible. To exist in the Metro-North, one has no choice but to recognize and catalogue and interrogate open social contradiction; the alternative is to embrace a race/sex/class naivete that can quite frankly get one killed. One trusts the 'Good Samaritanism' of the average New Yorker at one's own peril. Hell, the false consciousness contradiction of mainstream White happiness over Killen's conviction in the 'Mississippi Burning' case is enough to make the entire realm suspect. Remember, Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were lynched in a South unenthused about equal social and political and economic rights between the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners. Today, the South is still unenthused about such equality, and rushes to atone for its former sins without reflection upon its current ones. No one gets away clean from this tragedy; the entire reason this case gained national attention in 1964 was because two young White men died. Had James Earl Cheney drove solo that night, this nation would never have cared.

Part of my vitriol over Killen's conviction stems from the modern liberal double standard over the value of human life in America. Black men are lynched all over the former Confederacy, but suddenly in 1964, (several years after the first failures to pass anti-lynching legislation through Congress) this lynching is problematic because idealistic White college students are getting caught in the crossfire. Today, every missing persons case promoted in the national media has a White female face attached to it. No one gives a damn about lost minorities. (Eugene Robinson wrote a masterful op-ed on that subject, check it out here.) I'm so sick of every new Chandra Levy, or Laci Peterson, or Jennifer Wilbanks holding the nation's collective consciousness by the throat as White America trembles with fear over its lost Victorian virtue. What we should do is have every White American female implanted with a subdermal global positioning system implant, right under the left labia majora and connected to a multi-billion dollar computerized location and identification network, replete with state-of-the-art satellites, computer mainframes, and a cadre of elite FBI agents trained to be the perfect bloodhounds, so that the federal government can protect little White girls from getting themselves 'lost'. Sure, it's a total invasion of personal privacy, an obvious affront to civil liberties, and all around weird, but if its good enough for convicted sex offenders and child molesters, it should keep the blond, the beautiful, and the brainless from getting lost in Aruba.

Hell, if you interpret the Terri Schiavo tragicomedy as another White Girl Lost case, the psychedelic Congressional imposition upon the judicial branch headed by Grand Old Party stalwarts makes perfect sense - A Republican 'coalition of the willing' was told of a pretty little White girl who was stolen away by (if you believe some Right-to-Life hysteria) the dubious actions of an evil White man with a handlebar mustache named Michael "Sauron" Schiavo, one dark night, roughly fifteen years ago. The wizard doctors could not find her, as Dark Lord Michael Sauron hid the distressed damsel within her own unhealthy brain. At first, not knowing his true intentions, the girl's family and fellow townspeople worked with Dark Lord Michael Sauron to secure for her the best medical care. However, when the years passed and she didn't completely awake from her mental prison, the family and townspeople revolted, angered that Dark Lord Michael Sauron has united with the corrupt wizard Judge Saruman Greer the White to eliminate through the removal of a nutrient tube the damsel Terri Schiavo. Ongoing battles and skirmishes between the people and the two towers occur over several years, all coming to a nauseating, elongated, two-week deathwatch a few months back, when the Schiavo family recruited their own Fellowship of the Tube to battle the Dark Lord, including Frodo Jeb Bush, George W. Aragorn, the angry dwarf Rep. Tom Gimli (R-TX), activist Randall Legolas Terry, and a special appearance by Rev. Jesse Gandalf Jackson the Black. All this for one White girl who ruled them all.

Maybe Tolkien himself wrote that phantom memo discussing the electoral benefits of supporting radical right-wing 'culture of life' craziness that emerged from Sen. Mel Martinez's office during the national Schiavo psychosis; maybe Peter Jackson directed the cinematography when Bible-beating White families got themselves and their children arrested trying to import cups of water into Terri Schiavo's hospice room, but the autoposy made Schiavo's then-disputed condition abundantly clear for all concerned. The woman was without consciousness and/or any hope for recovery, merely existing in a persistent vegetative state. Under Florida law (and the many court cases that upheld these statutes) Michael Schiavo was legally responsible for carrying out her wishes. The point? Only the lives of White people seem to matter in a nation that prides itself on it's own tolerant racial harmony. President Bush himself signed a similar Texas law that allowed for the cessation of life in cases where no medical treatment available could assist a terminally ill patient (an example being the return of a person in a persistent vegetative state to normal consciousness). This law was carried out against an African American family on March 15, 2005 without any media coverage or Christian Right fanfare. In the end, one can argue that every case, just like every person, is different, yet deserving of equal respect and tolerance. And one can kid themselves. I honestly believe that today's mainstream White American earnestly desires and works toward racial harmony, no matter how conservative. Educated or not, politically savvy or not, Americans of all hues and colors attempt to respect and care for one another. Human beings are like that.

The problems emerge because everyone and every group desires racial harmony on their terms alone. For some professional, educated, upwardly mobile African American women, racial harmony only matters if they can both excel in the careers of their choice and marry the handsome, articulate, educated, professional, upwardly mobile African American man of their choice. Interracial relationships between Pierre Delacroix and (insert random Julia Roberts wannabe here) do not appeal to the SuperSista's ideal of race harmony, as her personal desires for Black matrimony and maternity are quite compromised. What good is racial harmony in corporate America if the exceptional, efficient, and consistently profitable Lebanese-American stockbroker is continually passed over for promotion because of post-911 fears of Arabic men? American racial harmony emerges as a meaningless ideal if the tolerance equilibrium presented allows African Americans living in major metropolitan areas like Washington D.C. to become infected by HIV/AIDS at ten times the rates of Whites and other groups. Are Asian American men supposed to enjoy an American racial harmony that continually presents them as the meek, mild-mannered mechanical animals of grey corporate cubicles and white hospital wards everywhere, always displayed as the medical or technological superiority, yet never shown as sensual or sexual in any sense? Should the Mexican American enjoy a racial harmony that depicts his people as the consistent dregs of society, only good for robbing hardworking Americans of manufacturing and agricultural work without American citizenship?

If we enjoy anything close to racial harmony in the United States of America, this harmony does not benefit the majority of Americans. Rather, it keeps wry smiles on the Old Spice technocrats who surround me, and promotes racial security for a ruling class smug in the knowledge that since they haven't murdered any civil rights workers today, they can't possibly be racist. Meanwhile, since I'm not yet drained of my color, any Jamie Foxx scared negro fear I display is no more than collateral damage they need not care about.

Oh, wait... here's my stop.