I
If you are a black employee of an American corporation and have decided to file a complaint about racism, you may be dismayed to find that the entire human resources department is black. The supervisor, of course, is white. Facing down this black army, you are immediately discouraged. To have to tell a black face, with your black face, that you’ve been passed over for a promotion or that you’re underpaid and you think it is because of your race, seems more than a little odd. It takes a black bulldozer to get over the psychological fun-house mirror of seeing blacks "everywhere" in the human resources metropolis and still argue about black invisibility within the company (We’re secretaries, mail-room clerks and custodians--not executives). You leave the confrontation and return to your desk, confused, postponed.

I consider the human resources department of the United States of America: Gutierrez, Gonzales, Powell, Rice. Since her arrival in the national spotlight, Condoleezza Rice has refused Hollywood black glamour tricks, avoiding what is usually regarded as the physical evidence of African-American "self-hate". She doesn’t wear a foundation that is three shades too light for her skin, she isn’t photographed from odd angles to keen her features, nor does she wear "highlights", hair extensions or color contacts. With her straightened hair in a gentle flip, the tiny, friendly space between her teeth and her carefully considered makeup, she recalls a handsome matron of the church or a favored conservative aunt; authoritative and fashionable, but never enough to draw attention to herself or to make a point. If you’d never seen a photograph of her or watched her on television, her first name alone (a tribute to the creativity of black people found in our monikers—Shameka, Taquisha, is there another Condoleezza on the planet?) would reveal to you who she was. Condoleezza Rice is a black American woman.

Which is why the racism that she represents is so elusive, that much more maddening. There is no question that Dr. Rice’s achievements will be marked in the annals of history as a triumph. She is an accomplished academic, a successful businesswoman, and a devoted military hawk; fiercely loyal to her country and her president. She represents American "progress." Yet something is deeply, painfully wrong. The theme-song to the 70’s sitcom of black upward-mobility "The Jeffersons" declared, "We finally got a piece of the pie!" My sister and I would jump up and dance to the song when the show came on. Maybe all black America danced to it. Did anyone stop to ask what kind of pie it was?

Having grown up in Birmingham, Alabama, it is easy to imagine that Condoleezza Rice, at least once in her life, stood before a water fountain marked "Colored Only". As the daughter of a Presbyterian pastor, she may have kicked the underside of a church pew with patent-leather shoes, was shushed during a lengthy service with a peppermint from her mother’s purse, or worse; an arched eyebrow silenced her and a girlfriend’s giggles with the promise of a beating after church. At the age of nine, Rice’s schoolmate Denise McNair was killed in the bombing of the Black Sixteenth Street Baptist Church when Ku Klux Klan member Robert Edward Chambliss planted 19 sticks of dynamite in the basement of the church. At 15, Rice began attending classes at the University of Denver with the goal of becoming a classical pianist, her aspirations changing soon after to political science. She earned a degree at 19 with honors, continued post-graduate education at the University of Notre Dame, and served as a provost at Stanford, where she is also a tenured professor. From 1989 through March 1991, she served in the Bush Administration as Director, and then Senior Director, of Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council, and a Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. On December 17, 2000, Rice was picked to serve as National Security Advisor and stepped down from her position at Stanford. If confirmed by the Senate in January 2005, Condoleezza Rice will be the first black female Secretary of State in the United States.

A black, a Jew, a Latino, an Asian, a woman and a homosexual can be brought to the table of capitalist power, but if they are all right-wing and conservative, if they are determined to maintain the status quo and to erase their unsavory "differences" by outwhiting the white people and outmaling the men, the richness that comes from true diversity, from the exchange of contrasting cultures, religions, genders and sexualities will never be realized. What remains is six variations of a patriarchal and white supremacist ideology—the same person, six times. It is this kind of diversity which is celebrated in the photographs found in company annual reports or at White House press conferences. A black woman at home watching television knows the people being sworn in don’t represent her or her community, and may actually do her great harm. She certainly doesn’t trust them; they look too hollowed out, benumbed, Stepford niggered.

On January 15, 2003, the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birth, President Bush addressed the country, voicing his opposition to "quota systems based on race". A president who chooses the birthday of the greatest American civil-rights icon to express his condemnation of affirmative action, can’t really care about diversity or about black students at American universities. Bush’s comments were directed specifically at the policies of the University of Michigan; having gone to school on that campus, I know that as far as retention of students of color is concerned, U of M, like most American universities, needs all the help it can get. Affirmative action goes against our puritanical values: you shouldn’t get something if you haven’t earned it. However, for the working-class black student who may come from a community with inferior schools, inadequate money for materials and no advanced placement classes; whose relatives have taken out loans to get her a place to live on campus; who has to barter at the financial-aid department, filling out scholarship applications and concentrating this year on how she’s going to pay for next year; who feels isolated on a predominantly white college campus and has to guard herself against the potential racist epithet uttered by the white person on her dormitory hall, or by her professor under the guise of "intellectual discourse"; who wants to stay in bed all semester, overwhelmed with the anxiety of trying to prove that she is there because of her achievements and not a number; by the time this student sits in a classroom at an American university, believe me, she’s earned it.

My great-grandmother was educated in rural South Carolina through the sixth grade, when racist whites burned her school to the ground. Several children were still inside. As the story is told in my family, she went back to the school and searched the ashes for the charred bones of her classmates, some of which she kept and placed on a mantlepiece. My grandmother grew up with those bones as a reminder of what education means in America for a black person, what it has sometimes cost.

Affirmative action was not meant for black idiots to have free reign, for colleges to hand out diplomas like flyers as an apology for past maltreatment, for someone to work three weeks in a company’s mail room and suddenly be advanced to CEO. It was a way, however flawed, to rectify the fact that education for blacks in the United States has been prevented through racist legislation, lynching and other forms of violence and murder. The easiest way to keep from having to share the American pie is to make sure certain people are too terrified to come near it.

While expressing her reservations at a press conference, Dr. Rice supported the president in his criticism of affirmative action and the policies of the University of Michigan, despite having acknowledged in prior interviews that her own tenured position at Stanford was based, in part, on the school’s diversity initiatives. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, also a beneficiary of the opportunities afforded blacks as a result of civil-rights efforts, and giddy from his own stylized brand of black contempt, is famous for his views against affirmative action as well. Perhaps the determinant factor in knowing one has reached the pinnacle of black capitalist power is when one is economically or politically powerful enough to slam the door of possibility on a set of young black fingers as brutally, and as finally, as any racist white person ever did or could.

II
I avoided seeing the Queen Latifah film "Bringing Down the House" for as long as possible but, so as not to appear hypocritical for condemning a movie I hadn’t seen, I relented. Friends had warned me about it, but their choice of words was curious; not the usual "it’s bad, but funny," assigned most modern black comedies, but "it’s painful." A black life is saturated with so much historic pain that it seems masochistic to deliberately seek out further persecutions, absolutely insane to pay for them. I went anyway. In the movie, Latifah plays Charlene, a black ex-convict who claims to have been falsely convicted of a crime, and who tricks Steve Martin’s Peter, a tax attorney, into meeting and defending her. Martin attempts feebly to rescue her from a series of humiliations, one involving an older white client played by Joan Plowright, who recalls at dinner a black servant from her childhood ("Our Ivy… We used to pay her nothing. We would put all the food we hadn't eaten from our plates onto one plate just for Ivy"), and sings a happy "darky" song (called "Mama, is Massa Gon’ Sell Us Tomorrow?") while Latifah serves her in a pink maid's uniform. Charlene has no real community in the film except her black "friends" who "bring down the house" by almost destroying it during a raucous party, and her ex-boyfriend, a black thug who tries to kill her. The movie sets up the romantic-comedy expectation of boy gets girl, but ends instead with Steve Martin going back to his ex-wife, and Charlene sitting on the lap of Peter’s lascivious, white best friend who has objectified and violated her throughout the movie with provocative racial and sexual come-ons. Latifah pulls down the shade and looks at the audience with a smile that promises a "bootylicious" good time once we are out of the theater, and a secured future for her character in the sex industry (Charlene to Peter at the end of the film: "Shaking is what I do best"). Disney meets Mandingo.

It is extraordinary, the impact of a tiny, silly movie—I am still recovering. After watching, I wince at the thought of a 12-year-old black girl; examining media images for a reflection of herself and her developing sexuality, she visits a friend who tells her she has to see the movie because it’s "hilarious." My mother told me, at about the same age, "Be careful what you expose yourself to. Some things change you in ways you can’t imagine and it can take a while to get yourself back" (I took this to mean "protect your innocence": as a rape and incest survivor, her innocence hadn’t been protected). What I want to shield the child from is not sex-talk or naked bodies; it’s the contempt the movie has for her, for humanity. It’s never the sex in pornography that eats away at us, nor is it just the sexual contact of incest that ultimately destroys; it’s the cynicism, the overwhelming psychological burden of despair that an adult pours into a child’s body and mind. We know how to protect our kids from the blatancy of obvious sex: what we don’t protect them from is the blatancy of commercialism. A black girl or boy who looks to this film for inspiration finds two: the sexual prostitution that occurs on the screen and the financial prostitution in the movie studio’s boardroom.

In "Monster’s Ball", Halle Berry plays Leticia, a black woman whose blacker husband is executed, leaving her to a job waiting tables and caring for their only son. She depends emotionally and financially on her husband’s prison guard on Death Row to be her great white savior. Leticia has no "people"; no distant black cousin to borrow rent money from before she is evicted from her house, no black neighbor to sit with and cry at a kitchen table over a piece of sweet-potato pie. Rudderless and adrift, Leticia has the color of a black woman, but no visible cultural antecedent or community; she may as well have hatched from an egg. Her son, the only family she has, is killed in a way that serves the plot more than it makes any comment on the frustration of their poverty: his death, like her husband’s, doesn’t linger or provide the viewer with a lasting grief—the movie presents him as a grotesque fat freak that she may secretly be relieved to be rid of. To keep from being completely abandoned one night, she offers a monologue about her son’s obesity and his greediness for fried chicken ("I do not want my baby to be fat like that…a black man in America, you can't be like that"), as she rips open her blouse and presents her breasts to Billy Bob Thornton’s depressed, grieving, and bewildered Hank (Leticia: "Make me feel good!"). Through offering sex, she is finally vital and focused, Hank is redeemed for the sin of participating in her husband’s murder by the State. Order is restored. Latifah and Berry’s characters revisit the old Southern plantation ethic, on screen; American homeland security achieved through a black woman’s vagina.

When I call a black friend to commiserate about "House", I’ve already anticipated his response. While we both agree that the movie is "wrong", we can’t even claim that Latifah was victimized, or complain about what "they" did to her—she executive- produced the film. "Well," he sighs, "at least she got paid." It is the same justification that African-Americans, perhaps many Americans, give for Condoleezza Rice: "Well, I don’t agree with her politics, but you can’t take away from her achievements. She is the most powerful black woman in America." As a leading proponent of the war in Iraq, a war that sends disproportionate numbers of black and Latino soldiers from economically depressed communities around the country to untimely and unnecessary deaths, this black female Secretary of State is not only not an inspiration, but a macabre distraction. The racism of the war continues to go unchallenged, perhaps not even considered, because it has a black stamp of approval. An oven may be made of the highest quality metals, work with amazing precision and be a creation of manufacturing art, but if it was used at Dachau, is it still to be admired? Is a great achievement still great in the service of a great wrong?

A black right-wing politician can be as isolated from her community as any Hollywood representation of a black person on-screen, and just as depressing to watch. She is an example to the black viewer of the impossibility of solidarity with other blacks or political empowerment, which may be the representation’s cynical intent. Black by racial lineage and cultural heritage, her complete disregard for a working-class black man or woman's challenges and her unaccountability to their reality, make her obsolete as a figure for black empowerment. In her high position, she may cleave to her president and appear to have the support of her party, but she is only allowed through their patronage to be the most "powerful" black in America as long as her power doesn’t shift or threaten anything that matters to them--their money or real power. If and when it does, he or she is out faster than one can say "no weapons of mass destruction" (see Colin Powell). Our Lady of the Black Hope stands at a White House podium asking us to admire her slave collar from Tiffany & Co., beautifully encrusted with diamonds. It sparkles, and we may admire its price, but in the end it’s just as tight as ours.

In his great speech, delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Maybe the right to black capitalism, to black neo-conservatism is part of that equality, but I believe that the freedom Dr. King wanted for blacks was also spiritual, not only economic. Might he question the "freedom" of a black athlete, no matter how great our admiration for his athletic skill, who endorses a sports company known for exploiting workers in Third World countries; countries who retaliate violently against those who fight for fair wages? The "freedom" of a rap artist who enjoys contracts with liquor companies whose advertising is targeted specifically at black communities, encouraging addiction, drug use and violent crime? Or a black conservative who is "free" to co-chair the president’s re-election campaign while serving as the Secretary of State; a state where black voters complain of disenfranchisement and illegal voting practices?

Our victory lies in not just seeing any black face in power, or any woman, but in the knowledge that as people of color, as gays, as women, we aren’t enabling greater crimes against those we represent, that our faces aren’t used to promote a war or to reassure, to anesthetize or disempower, to exploit or enslave. From the first black African who refused to get off the boat in Charleston, to Fanny Lou Hamer’s "we didn’t come all this way for no two seats" lock-out at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, we have a history of resistance, and must now insist on a definition of success that is not only financial; an idea of liberation that is greater than our ability to wield economic or military power. If that means asking different questions than most Americans; our legacy, as an enslaved people whose children were sold away from us so that someone’s company could have a great year, demands it.

In the end, despite her many achievements, I can’t claim Dr. Rice. If she is the realization of Dr. King’s dream, he should have been more specific.

copyright Max Gordon

[This message has been edited by max gordon (edited December 28, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by max gordon (edited December 28, 2004).]

Underlying his free associational emotive outpouring is the basic attitude, common among blacks in the USA, of "poor me" self pity.

Successful blacks in this country are so because they have "outwhited" whites, but not because they are racists in being pro-white in their attitudes, but rather because, like whites, they are responsible, law abidding, and achieving, because they are free of the destructive self pity so prevalent today among blacks. Liberals use this self pity to attract blacks to vote for them - those blacks like Clarence Thomas, Dr. Rice and Colin Powell are not liberals because they are not impeded by this self-limiting self-pity.

Affirmative action is evil - bad for the nation and bad for blacks. It rewards incompetency and thus reduces the nation's competency. This makes a nation less competitive in the world market, which lowers the standard of living of that less competitive nation. This also rewards and encourages the self pity of blacks, by telling them "you deserve special treatment like affirmative action, reparations, welfare, etc. because you have suffered from so much past mistreatment."

It is not the past mistreatment or present racism that is holding down the blacks - what oppresses blacks is the self pity that makes them blame whites for all their own self-caused limitations and problems. This self pity prevents blacks from accepting responsibility for their failures, which they must do in order to improve themselves and succesfully achieve.

Freed from this self pity, blacks could act more responsibly, work and study harder, be more law abidding and less indolent, and thereby outwhite whitey and become more successful.

The fact that many more college age blacks are in prison rather than in college reflects the self pity among blacks that makes them hate whites and white moral and achievement values. Such blacks value crime more than hard work, study and achievement.

galssman says: The fact that more college age blacks are in prison has a lot to do with the availability of decent legal representation too......

quote:

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Originally posted by glassman:
Art says:The fact that many more college age blacks are in prison rather than in college reflects the self pity among blacks that makes them hate whites and white moral and achievement values. Such blacks value crime more than hard work, study and achievement.

galssman says: The fact that more college age blacks are in prison has a lot to do with the availability of decent legal representation too......

about 20 yrs ago,i was assaulted by my white landlord in front of a county health inspector (i'm white,BTW)in Waldorf MD. he got convicted and it was his 28th such conviction....he got community service AGAIN.....
this light sentencing over and over again would never have happened to a black man in Waldorf MD....

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Art: Could have been the same result if the country official had been black.

Numbers of blacks (per-capita to the number in the whole country) are huge relative to whites, and their are many black cops and judges responsible for this. The liberal explanation of racism is just fantasy -doesn't wash.

quote:

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Originally posted by tigertony:
If you keep looking back and picking at everything now you can never move forward.Thank God for the changes and how far it has come.Everytime a Black person gets to a poweful position but is not a liberal.You liberal blacks want to call them uncle toms.Because clarence Thomas And condaleeza Rice are conservative.You want to claim the damage they are supposedly doing.I say.The damage being done is by Sharpton,jackson,and similar.I don't see you attack them and they are the biggest money grabbers of all time.In being equal just like every race you have different opinions they are people not Just black equal is equal if you don't like what they say or do say so.You are the one being racist.Do you see the other races running around throwing this there damaging our race crap.If you don't like what there views or points are attack the person,color doesn't matter.You can't have it both ways.And color doesn't matter.People like you are the ones that keep this crap alive,with these attacks and using the race card,try the people card COLOR DOESN"T MATTER,BUT IT DOES TO YOU.SO LET IT GO OR KEEP IT UP AND IT WILL NEVER GO. And to try to compare any of this to Saddam Hussein is just LUDICROUS (not the rapper).Buy the way,i am Hispanic and Italian and live in reality and by going about by life and not worrying about the looks or jobs i didn't get because I look mexican.It was there loss.Happens to lots of different people for different reasons.Is it right no,do i try to change it yes,did i speak up yes,when i have ever seen anything that was wrong being done to anyone i have stepped in.That is called life people don't like other people for stupid reasons (like yours)or there fat or mexican,or black or jewish or mean or whatever.So we continue to change it and it has come a million miles. just get your head out of the sand.Should other Blacks condem you for the light and image you are portraying on them as a black homosexual and bringing them down.Or if they disagree with homosexuality can't they just say that. Why should being black have anything to do with it.You are doing more harm than good and exactly what keeps this alive. We all have it made here compared to anywhere in the world.So insted of saying poor me,live your life,and enjoy it,and yes try to make a difference.The way that you are going about it will make it worse.And you will be doing what you are accusing others of.Good Luck Max (Hope you can get over this white man is keeping you down attitude)You are keeping you down.

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Obviously you don't hold yourself back by wallowing in self pity. Good for you!

Hispanics are a hard working people that have suffered as much as blacks but don't let it keep them down.

Most of the slavery in modern times is caused by blacks. Whites in this country suffered far more in death and injury than blacks ever did, all to free them from slavery, and now they want reparations?

Blacks are ingrates, and the most racist people alive.

quote:

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Originally posted by glassman:
let's face it, people just aren't very nice to each other....
so when you do come across a decent human being remember, they are just a sucker

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Yes, many decent people are ripe for the taking.

Being decent teaches you to be smart and not get taken. God wants you to become smart, not decent. That's why evil exploitation exists - to teach decent people to be smart.

You eventually learn to only be decent to decent people, but you first must learn to be able to tell who is decent and who is the con artist pretending to be decent.

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Originally posted by glassman:
how you behave when you come across decent people is the real test isn't it...

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No. Not at all. That's religious crap.

The real scoop, based on an enlightened morality: How a decent person behaves when they face evil or exploitive manipulation, is the real test.

Do they fight it, and stop evil? Or do they turn the other cheek or try to love it away, and thereby reinforce and promote evil (increasing harm to thenmselves and others)?

quote:

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Originally posted by glassman:
but how do we decide what is evil?
what if we destroy good, thinking it's evil?
does that make us evil?
or is intent the only thing that matters?

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In the final analysis, might makes right. This does not mean that moral princple is irrelevant. It only means that moral principle holds only when backed by might.

There is no absolute morality - such notions are delusional myths. Morality exists only as an evaluation - an assessment of actual/predicted reward/punishment properties of an impulse, idea, or action, in terms of self and/or others.

Each of us is the moral authority who decides (evaluates) actual/predicted reward/punishment properties of an impulse, idea, or action, in terms of ourselves and/or others.

If I say I am right and you are wrong, and you disagree, it is power (might) that decides. This is might makes right. Such power may come from the force of ideas - we argue and one of us agrees with the other and accepts the other's opinion. Such power may come from our relationship - you agree with me when I am your boss, or a spouse you care for, etc. Such power may come from your aggression - you kill me and thatsettles our conflict. Such power may come from the judiciary - the court decides which of us is right. Such power may come politically - more people in our group aggree with me than with you, and group pressure changes your mind.

quote:

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Originally posted by glassman:
so, that tank in tienanmen square was right?

and smallpox was good, but now it'snot?

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Anything is right and wrong - there are no moral absolutes. The tank was right from the perspective of China's leaders but wrong from the perspective of protesting students. China's leaders prevailed. Small pox is good from the perspective of the small pox and from the perspective of the enemies of the small pox victims, but bad from the perspective of the small pox victims and those who love the vicitms.

Do you think the US is right or are the terrorists right - depends on your perspective. Some liberals openly wish that the terrorists defeat the US armed forces in Iraq, and they are right - from their perspective (and from the perspective of the enemies of the US like Russia, France, China, Syria, Iran, etc.).

Moral evaluations are made from one or more perspectives. As Bush correctly said, you are either with us or against us. Most of the world is against us. We are number 1 and everyone wants to see us fail and go down - even many US citizens. Liberals hate America - they hate capitalism and big business, and hate all use of force on the part of the US. From this perspective the US is immoral in fighting terrorism with military force.