I was going to post a response to gailwmcdonald's diary but my comment was so long, I realized I was better off making this its own diary.
Like most of you, the very idea of racism makes me irate. But I have found that if a person can stay calm, cool and collected that you can make headway when dealing with a racist. Here are my tips. If you have any learnings or feedback, please reply in the comment field.
I am so mad right now I don't know what to do. For those unfamiliar with me, I live in a small, conservative, republican town in Georgia. I just had a HUGE argument with my next door neighbor. After seeing my new shiny Obama sticker on my van, she launched into an attack on me that was unprovoked and very unsettling. She asked me why he couldn't say the pledge of allegiance to which I replied, that is not true. I then explained the details of various lies and smears. She continued to bring up every smear out there from the pledge to the swearing in on the Koran. I told her she needed to check her facts as these had all been disproved. She then asked, "So if he is a Muslim, and did swear on a Koran, then would you still support him?" I explained that I would support him because a person's religion is not an important factor to me. Which is when she said, "I hope if he gets elected, that he is shot and killed within 24 hours!"
First off, I'm a HUGE fan of the NYTimes. I think the decline of the newspaper is a terrible thing. I'm a big time news junkie. I've been reading the Times everyday for the last eight years. But I'm also a Native American attorney who has studied Critical Race Theory and am highly sensitive to images of cultural stereotypes. Imagine my reaction as I came to work early to read the papers and saw the image below before I went to DC District Court this morning for a hearing on Nez Perce v. Kempthorne.
I met Irwin Tang first thing Thursday morning at Netroots Nation at the Asian American Pacific Islander Caucus. He held up his book Gook: John McCain's Racism and Why It Matters. As Irwin says, many many people have an immediate visceral reaction to it, and this was true of me.
During the introduction rounds, I found myself saying that his book needed to be a film, and I was volunteering! Even faster, though, was Uptake, who videotaped an interview with Irwin at Netroots Nation and put it up:
Funny thing about this election is that the media seems to think that Barack Obama’s challenge of appealing to both Black and White voters is somehow new. Consider, as evidence, the following opening sentence of the John McCormick and Rick Pearson’s July 15th cover story in the Chicago Tribune.
"When it comes to African-American audiences, some have called Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential bid a ‘dual-track’ candidacy, one that seeks to prove he is in tune with the needs of the black community while also not alienating whites."
Really?!! Then I suppose that makes McCain a dual-track candidate too, since he presumably has to prove that he is in tune with the needs of the white community while not alienating African Americans and other people of color. After all, Latinos and African Americans alone comprise over 30% of the U.S. population. Doesn’t McCain face the exact same challenge of appealing to voters across racial lines? Hasn’t every single Presidential hopeful in modern times?
Yesterday on his Radio Factor, Bill O’Reilly tried as hard as he could to come up with something that proved the case those dang smear sites were making. That the Fox News channel is racist. He even brought on the ever brilliant, albeit Fox News consultant, Prof. Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, a real live African-American, to try to help him.
Problem is, Bill nor Prof. Hill ever looked at the "Fox’s Quarterback" (Bill’s own egoless designation) himself.
Looking back, early June was a utopia. Barack Obama, the embodiment of change, a historic candidate, was racking up the delegates. His rival, Hillary Clinton, was about to capitulate. Obama rented out an NBA arena to claim the nomination. Poll after poll showed the Democrats had a great chance to win in November.
This is great, I thought. I have never voted for a winning candidate for national office in any election in my life. It's going to feel so nice to win one.
But then it was all taken away from me. I was not only mad, but dejected. For months, politics were simultaneously news, entertainment, a passion, and something to look forward to.
No longer.
I went on a self-imposed diet of no MSNBC...no Politico....no Kos...no Huffington Post. There was nothing for me there.
But that's not where this story ends. This is a redemption tale. I have found a way to root for Obama again. Come election night, I will be happy. If you were feeling down on Obama, read on, because I have a way for you to get excited about progressive politics again.
I ran across this story and it reminded me of a story my sister told me years ago.
She was working as a retail clerk in a Pier 1 store outside of Dallas. This would have been around 1990. Her manager told her that part of her job was to shadow all African American customers when they came into the store. So she did. She followed them around. Just out of high school my sister was young and naive. When she finally realized why she was shadowing these customers she quit the job.
A press conference was held today at offices of Fox News in New York. The purpose of the gathering was to deliver a petition with over 600,000 names to network executives calling for an end to the racist attacks against black Americans including Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle. The petition is the work of Color of Change and MoveOn and asks Fox News CEO Roger Ailes to respond to the allegation that...
"Fox has developed a pattern of airing racially offensive attacks, then apologizing only after controversy erupts. Forced, half-hearted apologies do not demonstrate good faith when the larger pattern of offensive rhetoric continues."
This is heresy I know, since most of the white majority likes to pretend that it’s colorblind, but race needs to be part of the calculus in the November election for all voters. Of course, it was never not going to be part of the equation. And race is certainly part of the explicit discourse for Black voters, as it always is. My point is that it's high time white folks join in the discussion and acknowledge that it matters. Because it does.
Here’s what’s at stake in November: For the first time in history, there is a real possibility that "The Man" won’t be White. The implications will take years to sort out, but here are some very early thoughts about why the candidate’s race is important enough to influence our vote. Because the implications of a Black President are somewhat different for different identity groups, I break it down accordingly. But, and make no mistake about this, all other things being equal, having a Black President would benefit all Americans -- well almost.
This video is of a portion of a speech by AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Richard Trumka at the Steelworkers' convention in early July. He addresses the issue of racism in a very powerful way. Take a look.
"There's not a single good reason for any worker, especially any union member to vote against Barack Obama," Trumka stated. "There's only one really bad reason to vote against Barack Obama, and that's because he's not white."
At the mention of the sensitive and difficult subject of racism and the election, the steelworkers rose to their feet to praise Trumka for taking it head on.
Trumka recalled having a conversation with a Democratic Party worker during the primary and listening to a laundry list of reasons that person wouldn't support Obama. They were all divisive and inaccurate, he recounted.
In the early morning hours on July 14, 2008 in Northport, Alabama, which bills itself as an All-American City (no immigrants allowed?), a number of residents of the Quail Ridge Mobile Home Park—which is nestled between Harper Road and Park West Drive—had their vehicles, homes and yards vandalized with painted racial slurs and the letters "KKK". The Unsolved Hate Crimes webpage of the Northport Police Department's website described the attack on the mixed-race trailer park community which sits adjacent to the Tuscaloosa Regional Airport in detail:
I am outraged, but not surprised that the 3rd Circuit Court today denied Mumia's appeal for an 'en banc' hearing. Now, it's onto the US Supreme Court, where chances of fairness are slim
The fascists and sadists in our country have been given the green light. In her book "The House of the Spirits", after the assasination of the duly elected president in Chile, Salvador Allende, and at the time of the fictionalized takeover by Pinochet, the police and military which previously were there to protect the Chilean citizens, turn on their own people to aprehend them torture them, and make them dissapear, all in the name of a defense of "freedom". Similarly, our own government authorities are turning our nation into a country where people disappear, are tortured, arrested (if they look foreign) all in the name of "protecting the homeland". Isabel Allende rethorically asks in the novel, "Where have these people been hiding, where did they come from?" and the answer is: "They are our neighbors. The have been living amongst us...but now they are emboldened." Emboldened indeed! They were given the green light by Pinochet. Similarly, the sadists and torturers in our midst have been given the green light.
