race

Lost in Peyton Place

Procrastination-related random google find of the night: Samuel Peyton, fake founder of faketown Peyton Place was black in the book. From David M. Jones' “Blacks, Greeks, and Freaks: Othering as Social Critique in Peyton Place”:

After his arrival in town by train, Makris is surprised by how little the townspeople want to engage in conversation. Speaking with the owner of the town cafe, Corey Hyde, Markris receives evasive answers when he asks about the origin of the town’s name:

“Peyton Place…is the oddest name for a town I’ve every heard. Who is it named for?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Corey, making unnecessary circular motions with a cloth on his immaculate counter. “There’s plenty of towns have funny names. Take that Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I had a kid took French over to the high school. Told me Baton Rouge means Red Stick. Now, ain’t that a helluva name for a town? Red Stick, Louisiana. And what about that Des Moines, Iowa? What a crazy name that is.”

“True,” said Markis. “But for whom is Peyton Place named, or for what?”

“Some feller that built a castle up here, back before the Civil War. Feller by the name of Samuel Peyton,” said Corey, reluctantly.

“A castle!” exclaimed Makris.

“Yep. A real, true, honest-to-God castle, transported over here from England, every stick and stone of it.”

“Who was this Peyton? asked Makris. “An exiled duke?”

“Nah,” said Corey Hyde. “Just a feller with money to burn. Excuse me, Mr. Makris. I got things to do in the kitchen.”

The old man at the end of the counter chuckled. “Fact of the matter, Mr. Makris,” said Clayton Frazier in a loud voice, “is that this town was named for a friggin’ nigger. That’s what ails Corey. He’s delicate like, and just don’t want to spit it right out” (102).

The latter sections of the novel tell more about Samuel Peyton, when a reporter from out of town interviews Clayton Frazier. According to Frazier, Peyton escaped from slavery long before the Civil War, “at a time when most folks looked on niggers as work horses, or mules” (329). He escaped to France, married a French girl, and built a castle on the highest point in the then-unoccupied landscape around Peyton Place. Both Peyton and his wife eventually die of tuberculosis, and according to his will, the land and castle was given to the state, left in disrepair but towering over the town of Peyton Place that grew up around it.

Metalious’ development of the Peyton plot focuses on racial difference, setting up a conditional shift in power as the townspeople live their lives in the physical and symbolic shadow of Samuel Peyton. In the film and television versions, Samuel Peyton is no longer identified as an African American character – in the television version, he becomes a wealthy industrialist with a resemblance to J.R. Ewing of Dallas. [full]


"We see it, too. We see it every day, we never think about it. Do you Allison?"

Peyton Place
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20 Year Old Kisses and Punctums

Found these videos for Lil Louis' French Kiss on Youtube last night, and went to bed thinking that I should put them up on ye olde blog, along with a note to the effect of: "I never knew these videos existed!"


But when I woke up this morning I dimly remembered seeing these images 20 years ago. It was the wind-up Africans that brought all it back to me. I remember sitting in a dorm room and having an extended conversation about irony, racism, kitsch, cross-cultural confusion, et cetera, et cetera, all of it prompted by that video.

Video director/Youtube submitter "zynsk" (any intel on him or her? Likely him.) writes of the first video embedded above:

This is actually the second version of the video I made for French Kiss. The first one was "pulled" by the record company and they'd only pay for 2 minutes worth of video so here it is.

Said first video is embedded below.


The word punctum is another 20 year old memory, this from college readings of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Wikipedia, as usual, puts it better than I can on short notice, defining as punctum as "the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within [a photograph]."

The kitsch racist wind-up toys in a video for a song I loved are exactly the sort of "wounding, personally touching detail" that could linger for 20 years, as is (now that I think about it) the bogish-seeming tyke in sunglasses. (As one of the wags in the Youtube comments puts it "French Kiss makes babies!") Still, because the video was an kind of addendum to French Kiss, I don't remember those racial angles being prominent in my thinking about the song 20 years ago, having focused instead on the song's completely bananas and largely mathematical structural elements. I wrote a piece in Bidoun last year about, like, glory, phlogiston, the Black Plague and a few other things, and, looking back, the parts about house music now seem to be less about "house music" in general and more about French Kiss in particular.

Still, the house mix was too compelling to turn away from. I was fascinated by math as a kid, and I would often try to graph the mixes on quadrille paper, assigning admittedly arbitrary values and lines and algebraic expressions to beats, vocal lines, crescendos, and fades. This work was easier with the already schematic dance music, and I would often fantasize about working backwards from a graph and creating a song from it. The pictures always struck me as beautiful, futuristic, graffiti-like, and I wondered what the graph of the Greatest Record Ever might look like. I understood from my readings in physics (another interest) that scientists were on a quest to find a grand unified theory that could explain and encompass everything, and I imagined that such a thing must exist for music, too, a graph of the perfect, hidden beat. This notion seemed to solve the problem of the Greatest Song Ever, as whatever song I loved at any moment could be understood to be an aspect or piece of the Perfect Song, with some lines and equations omitted or mathematically transformed. The next Greatest Song Ever didn't erase or eclipse the previous one; they were all the same. The upshot, of course, was that I might have to keep listening, cataloguing, and graphing forever. Saturdays and Sundays I would lay in bed well past noon, more haggard than any child of relative quiet and privilege should have been. [full yackity smack]

Those toys are tantalizing, though: relentless, mechanized, racially charged, fuck-machine-ish. I wrote Zynsk on Youtube to ask him for for the full story on what he was thinking - and what the label objected to! - and will post any response I get.

Off to brunch, but just a closing archaeological detail: What got me thinking about French Kiss was this song:


There is another (live?) version where the schematic, gloriously insane-making part hangs way longer:


I have become a regular invitee to a series of house parties attended largely by a clique of deeply butch, 5-foot and under Guatemalan lesbians (a story for another day), and not a BBQ goes by when they don't play that Hechizeros Band song, the gravel driveway turning into a makeshift dancefloor on a completely random central LA street. When that beeping starts and hangs, getting louder and threatening to go on forever, they go completely crazy. Not to brag or boast, but I have gotten laid more than once directly because of French Kiss, the song a kind of virtual, processing black box where amorphous late night dance floor attraction goes in and comes out the other side focused and rationalized in the, como de dice?, "lets grab a cab" sense of "focused and rationalized." I have completely platonic and deeply loved female (and a few male) friends with whom dancing to French Kiss at 5 in the morning is a fondly remembered peak experience where the ritual, cliff's-edge implication of nookie, the look into parallel universes, is the foundational moment of our bond. Dancing to Hechizeros Band with those grinding Guatemalan girls, with their slicked back, quasi-pompadours, is exactly like that except the gender roles are reversed. When the song changes and the dancefloor clears they wink at me as we crowd off to the bar. And me? All I can do is blush.

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all things being equal

Michael Steele Eats the Pungent Fruit of Rush Limbaugh's Meaty Ass**

Comparing conservatives to black people is the new black, apparently:

Rush = Oprah

A week ago a reporter from a major American newspaper called me to talk about Rush. I agreed to do the interview provided it was recorded and that I could air it after the story the reporter was working on ran. The reporter asked me if Rush was a "leader," and I said no. He is, I continued, a communicator, a pundit and an entertainer, one of the two best in the country --along with Oprah. And a man of extraordinary influence. I think the Rush-Oprah comparison startled the reporter, but it is exactly correct. They have the same reach, and though they have almost completely different approaches to life, both are deeply sincere about their views and thus far beyond merely "effective." Both communicators change lives. [full story - h/t Ross Douthat, who concurs]

Rush = Jesse

Rush is to the Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s. He plays an important role in our coalition, and of course he and his supporters have to be treated with respect. But he cannot be allowed to be the public face of the enterprise – and we have to find ways of assuring the public that he is just one Republican voice among many, and very far from the most important. [full story]

Talking Android Bobby = Barack

He is the Republican party's wunderkind. His family's triumph-over-adversity narrative is nearly as powerful as that of U.S. President Barack Obama's. And now, Bobby Jindal, the 37-year-old Governor of Louisiana, is closer to becoming a household name — launching onto the national platform on prime-time television by delivering the Republican party's rebuttal to the President's address to Congress.

It's a moment in history that's being compared to the keynote address a then-unknown Mr. Obama delivered in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. [full story]

Talking Android Michael = Barack

What few people know is that when Obama first took to the national stage in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, there was another African-American man who was already climbing the political ladder of success within the Republican Party. In fact, former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael S. Steele gave the counterpoint to Obama's speech that year. Now, he's vying for chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, which would make him the most recognized Black conservative in the nation. ESSENCE.com talked to Steele about taking on this monumental task, convincing Black folks to better understand the party, and the possibility of one day stepping into Obama's shoes as president. [full story]

Talking Android Michael ≠ Barack, because he's his evil twin (Or is that Talking Android Michael ƒ-1 Barack? ≅?)

Evil twin, nemesis, archenemy—whatever the term, every great protagonist has one. Superman had Bizarro, his alternate-universe self. Spock from Star Trek had the shady, goateed "mirror" Spock. Super Mario has the cackling Wario.

And Barack Obama has Michael Steele. [full story]

Talking Android Bobby + Talking Android Michael = Barack

Not long after Barack Obama delivers his pseudo–State of the Union on February 24, the official televised Republican riposte will be uncorked by a guy who violates almost every prevailing liberal stereotype of the contemporary GOP: the governor of Louisiana, Piyush “Bobby” Jindal. At 37, Jindal is the nation’s youngest governor and the first Indian-American to win statewide office in U.S. history. The son of Punjabi immigrants, he’s an Ivy League–educated Rhodes scholar and an unrepentant policy wonk, with heterodox views on his specialty, which is health care, and a reputation for competence as much as ideology. For all these reasons and others, Jindal strikes many savvy conservatives as the answer to their party’s prayers: a brainy, precocious, multiculti change agent—a Republican Obama.

Precious few have ever described Michael Steele quite that way, though his recent rise to national prominence is hard to imagine outside the context of our new president. The victory of Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor and failed Senate candidate, in the contest to become chairman of the Republican National Committee came as a surprise; he’d often been criticized as insufficiently far right to win. But against a field that included an incumbent Bush holdover, a southern party operative who until recently belonged to an all-white country club, and the genius who sent out that infamous Christmas CD with the song “Barack the Magic Negro,” Steele emerged as the first African-American head of the RNC—having argued that he offered a solution to what he called the party’s “image problem.” [full story]

(Oh, on a related topic: Slumdog Millionaire = Crash.)

------------

** For those of you wondering about the quote in the image up top: It seems talking androids are fueled by shit, because Michael Steele recently sat down to feast on the pungent fruit of Rush Limbaugh's meaty ass:

In the new game of chicken between Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh, the loser is...Michael Steele, who now says he never meant to diminish the voice and leadership of Limbaugh.

In an interview with the Politico, Steele said: "My intent was not to go after Rush - I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh. I was maybe a little bit inarticulate...There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership." [full story]

Talking Android Bobby Jindal asked for a plate of what Steele was having and chowed down as well.

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actually

re: The Great Endarkening, I wrote:

Typical! They put us in charge at the precise moment it all really starts to come unglued.

But, obviously, the other thing is that it's this very "ungluing" that unsticks the door enough for a Presidential first (I would argue black or female) to (maybe) walk through. A strong and prosperous America as we have previously understood those things to mean (strong, prosperous, America) would have neither needed nor allowed now evoked (invoked?) the kind of change a first black or female president represents.

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better not save it for 2050

Three distinct things that made an echo recently:

1 - In a Generation, Minorities May Be the U.S. Majority

Ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of the nation’s population in a little more than a generation, according to new Census Bureau projections, a transformation that is occurring faster than anticipated just a few years ago.

The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050. [full story]

2 - Every asshole in America knows the change is coming:

All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.

Save it for 2050.

It also exposes a very strong weakness for him—his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values. [full asshole, by which I mean, full Mark Penn]

3 - But unless we (by which I mean you and I, dear reader) do something quick, that demographic inheritance check is very likely going to bounce:

Meanwhile, Russia got its house in order under the non-senile, non-alcoholic Vladimir Putin, and woke up along about 2007 to find itself the leading oil and natural gas producer in the world. Among the various consequences of this was Russia's reemergence as a new kind of world power -- an energy resource power, with the energy destiny of Europe pretty much in its hands. [...]

We could have spent the past ten years getting our own house in order -- waking up to the obsolescence of our suburban life-style, scaling back on the Happy Motoring, reconnecting our cities with world-class passenger rail, creating wealth by producing things of value (instead of resorting to financial racketeering), protecting our borders, and taking the necessary measures to defend and update our own industries. Instead, we pissed our time and resources away. Nations do make tragic errors of the collective will. The cluelessness of George Bush is nothing less than a perfect metaphor for the failure of a whole generation. The Boomers will be identified as the generation that wrecked America. [full Jim Kunstler on the implications of the Georgian conflict] [h/t James Wolcott]

Typical! They put us in charge at the precise moment it all really starts to come unglued. Better get your lead on now, colored folks, while there is still an outside chance of righting the ship. 2050 will be too late, and, moreover, the Mexicans and Central Americans will be blamed for the mess, and, by extension, blacks, gays, cities, evolution and so forth.

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i forgot about that one

"Republicans wear sneakers, too." - Michael Jordan on why he wouldn't endorse Harvey Gantt in Gantt's run for Jesse Helms' senate seat. h/t Christopher Chambers for the reminder.

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attending that deflated racist gasbag's funeral

According to the LAT:

Vice President Dick Cheney
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
Sen. Elizabeth Dole
former Republican presidential candidate Kansas Sen. Bob Dole
GOP Sen. Richard Burr, sat nearby.
Chris Dodd of Connecticut
Joe Biden of Delaware
Gov. Mike Easley
Cindy McCain

I get a lot of mail from Chris Dodd, asking me to call my congressman or send an email, and as such it was sad to see him on the above list. In much the same way that I refuse to EVER use any of Firedoglake's activism tools or to participate in any action sourced from them, I'll be unsubscribing from Dodd's list and action alerts. There are lots of ways for me to reach out to Congress without having to tacitly endorse Dodd by giving him my data or allowing him to bundle me into an aggregate list of people he can claim to have activated or corralled. As far as I'm concerned, unless you are Helms' bastard child, there's no reason for a progressive to be crying in the front row at his funeral. And even then...

But into the Book of Racial Grudges, Dodd! Right next to Hamsher!

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pledge #1: R. Kelly

Jelani Cobb sends this in:

Statement of Black Men Against the Exploitation of Black Women

Six years have gone by since we first heard the allegations that R. Kelly had filmed himself having sex with an underage girl. During that time we have seen the videotape being hawked on street corners in Black communities, as if the dehumanization of one of our own was not at stake. We have seen entertainers rally around him and watched his career reach new heights despite the grave possibility that he had molested and urinated on a 13-year old girl. We saw African Americans purchase millions of his records despite the long history of such charges swirling around the singer. Worst of all, we have witnessed the sad vision of Black people cheering his acquittal with a fervor usually reserved for community heroes and shaken our heads at the stunning lack of outrage over the verdict in the broader Black community.

Over these years, justice has been delayed and it has been denied. Perhaps a jury can accept R. Kelly's absurd defense and find "reasonable doubt" despite the fact that the film was shot in his home and featured a man who was identical to him. Perhaps they doubted that the young woman in the courtroom was, in fact, the same person featured in the ten year old video. But there is no doubt about this: some young Black woman was filmed being degraded and exploited by a much older Black man, some daughter of our community was left unprotected, and somewhere another Black woman is being molested, abused or raped and our callous handling of this case will make it that much more difficult for her to come forward and be believed. And each of us is responsible for it.

We have proudly seen the community take to the streets in defense of Black men who have been the victims of police violence or racist attacks, but that righteous outrage only highlights the silence surrounding this verdict.

We believe that our judgment has been clouded by celebrity-worship; we believe that we are a community in crisis and that our addiction to sexism has reached such an extreme that many of us cannot even recognize child molestation when we see it.
We recognize the absolute necessity for Black men to speak in a single, unified voice and state something that should be absolutely obvious: that the women of our community are full human beings, that we cannot and will not tolerate the poisonous hatred of women that has already damaged our families, relationships and culture.

We believe that our daughters are precious and they deserve our protection. We believe that Black men must take responsibility for our contributions to this terrible state of affairs and make an effort to change our lives and our communities.

This is about more than R. Kelly's claims to innocence. It is about our survival as a community. Until we believe that our daughters, sisters, mothers, wives and friends are worthy of justice, until we believe that rape, domestic violence and the casual sexism that permeates our culture are absolutely unacceptable, until we recognize that the first priority of any community is the protection of its young, we will remain in this tragic dead-end.

We ask that you:

  • Sign your name if you are a Black male who supports this statement: http://www.petitiononline.com/rkelly/petition.html
  • Forward this statement to your entire network and ask other Black males to sign as well
  • Make a personal pledge to never support R. Kelly again in any form or fashion, unless he publicly apologizes for his behavior and gets help for his long-standing sexual conduct, in his private life and in his music
  • Make a commitment in your own life to never to hit, beat, molest, rape, or exploit Black females in any way and, if you have, to take ownership for your behavior, seek emotional and spiritual help, and, over time, become a voice against all forms of Black female exploitation
  • Challenge other Black males, no matter their age, class or educational background, or status in life, if they engage in behavior and language that is exploitative and or disrespectful to Black females in any way. If you say nothing, you become just as guilty.
  • Learn to listen to the voices, concerns, needs, criticisms, and challenges of Black females, because they are our equals, and because in listening we will learn a new and different kind of Black manhood

That works for me.

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if only you negroes had oil


I guess there's no chance cut-and-run McCain helped inspire Osama?

In 1993, 18 U.S. soldiers, part of a contingent sent on a humanitarian mission to famine-struck Somalia, were murdered by street fighters in Mogadishu. Bin Laden later claimed that some of the Arab Afghans were involved. The main thing to bin Laden, howev er, was the horrified American reaction to the deaths. Within six months, the U.S. had withdrawn from Somalia. In interviews, bin Laden has said that his forces expected the Americans to be tough like the Soviets but instead found that they were "paper ti gers" who "after a few blows ran in defeat."[from Time]

Just to be clear, I'm not endorsing the invasions of Somalia and Haiti, just pointing out that Republican rhetoric about invasion, withdrawal and the rightness of those courses of action is bullshit.

h/t Wayne for forwarding.

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a special kind of stupid

special

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compare and contrast

bumpity
bumpity


grunt
grunt

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the truth

isaiah

el truth

[El Pais cover h/t gawker]

My man Siddhartha, like many people, refers to Obama as "The Hope" but every now and then a wire gets crossed and he calls him (or maybe I just hear?) "The Truth."

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how to be useful?

winner

How to be useful?

That's the thing I've been wondering since last night. How can I, ebog, myself, personally do my part to help insure Obama becomes the next president of the United States? Hillary Clinton and her dead-enders don't think Obama has a chance in hell of becoming POTUS, so they're not just going be useless moving forward but flat out detrimental. I think these people could actually see him becoming the Democratic nominee - TO THEIR INCREDULITY AND CHAGRIN - this because they're the kind of self-hating "liberals" who believe their party is self-destructive, weak-willed and uniquely susceptible to racial bullying. These kind of White Resentment Democrats completely agree with Rush Limbaugh that black people get things handed to them on silver platters, and up until last night they imagined a future for the party where the mark of its strength would be its ability to resist being "mau-maued". The dream of such a Democratic party probably ended last night - provided of course, Obama wins.

So: how to be useful? Blog? Volunteer? Phone bank? Donate? What are you planning to do?

Make no mistake. The Clinton surrogates (not to mention the Clintons themselves) who will be campaigning for Obama over the next few months will do so half-hearted and with the fingers crossed. They just don't believe a black man can ever become POTUS. That's not saying they think it would be a bad or anything were such an event to occur (some of my best friends, and all), it's just that they don't think it will happen given what they think they know about America. That's why Hillary Clinton was willing to praise McCain and attack Obama in the same breath:


[h/t Ta-Nehisi]

That, or they're just terrified that politics, like popular music or big league sports, will be transformed by the rise of Obama in ways that will make it difficult for the average white politician to effectively compete. I have had my issues with The Hope, in that there are aspects of it that strike me as the political analogue of the Oprah-approved Secret, but I have never bought into the idea that Obama supporters are "cultish." Some people connect with Obama so deeply not because they're pre-disposed to be mindless followers, but because this particular candidate offers those who are properly configured unique and novel ways to connect. Obama's race, his youth, his demeanor, his facility with popular culture, his message, his looks, his interactions with his wife, his embrace of the internet, his calm, all of it - as the total candidate package Barack Obama just offers more facets, channels, textures and hooks for people relate to and latch onto. The difference between him and Hillary just at the level of candidate craft was often like comparing an analog broadcast tv with a digital HD in surround with TIVO. If you'd never experienced the new and better version of the tube, people who spend a lot of time fiddling with it and all those features might seem cultish to you as well.

Every black "first" changes the game they enter irrevocably, for the simple reason that overcoming the structural obstacles between them and the playing field often calls upon them to be "better" in some aspects than most of their white teammates, sometimes heroically so. The irony here, of course, is that Hillary Clinton had a chance to be a first too, but she squandered it by clinging to the most regressive elements of her party and the most shameful riffs in American political rhetoric. Nobody jumps from a minor, chitlin, girls or other marginal league to national "majors" that they were previousl excluded from by offering solid familiar fundamentals. They do it by offering something so unusual that it makes up for them being negroes, minor, chitlin, girls or marginal. They do it by being useful.

There's a risk of exceptionalism and essentialism in the idea that black participants by definition bring new qualities to any field of endeavor that they've been previously excluded/absent from (whatever the reason). But the one thing you can safely say they bring is the experience of being excluded from the job on the basis of race. I imagine that there are gigs where that specific background and experience adds little to a person's conduct of their job, this even as the reduction of an inequality increases the general amount of good and justice in the world. But I don't think the presidency is one of those jobs. I think a black president is by definition a better president because of the unique understandings, rhetoric, ways of connecting to country, types of moral suasion, demons and, yes, pressures they will be under. There are things that a white Democratic president might do that would be simply impossible for a black Democrat to do. Oppose reductions in mandatory drug minimums, for example.

But since so much about racial psychology is contradictory, hand and hand with the fear that Obama can't win is the equally racist fear that he can't lose. This fear about Obama isn't that he'll be, as Pandagon's Jesse Taylor put it, "Blackazoid, the Nubian Avenger, here to right all the perceived wrongs black people illegitimately feel were heaped on them since we solved racism in 1963," but that he'll be Oprah, Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. This fear worries that no "regular" white person will ever win again once Obama has changed the game, especially not in a nation where millions and millions of potential voters recognize a Hova reference when they see one. And yes, I know there are lots of white stars in the NBA. White folks know them too, and know that they're Croatians and Canadians and Spaniards and so on.

The beauty of this terror is that it encompasses not just the black body that inspires it but all those bodies - black and otherwise - that are sympatico with that originating black body. White Resentment Democrats don't just resent black people, they have issues with the young and the cool and the internet and youtube and loud music and the agile - everything really that leaves them feeling out of touch and falling farther behind day by day. They disdained Kerry for being a "snob" and they would have resented John Edwards for being too good looking. Hillary doesn't represent these people, she roused them from a stupor in hopes of using them against Obama, and now she's about to slink off and leave the mess for him to fix.

But it's amazing, isn't it? A black nominee for the president of the United States! And not some Colin Powell ex-soldier bullshit aimed at the lizard brain, his blackness painted over in a protective layer of medals. Who woulda thunk it?

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transgenders, illegals, enemy combatants, inadequate black men

I guess every era is convinced they live in the best/worst of times, but when I read stories like this one in the LA Times (h/t Digby) I feel that our claim on America's nadir is more than narcissism:

In May 2007, Victoria Arellano, a 23-year-old transgender immigrant from Mexico, was sent to a detention center in San Pedro after being arrested on a traffic charge.

Arellano, who was born a male and had come to the United States illegally as a child, had AIDS at the time of her arrest but exhibited no symptoms of the disease because of the medication she took daily. But once detained, her health began to deteriorate.She lost weight and became sick. She repeatedly pleaded with staff members at the detention center to see a doctor to get the antibiotics she needed to stay alive, according to immigrant detainees with whom Arellano shared a dormitory-style cell. But her requests were routinely ignored.

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geraldine ferraro's america


Apologies for the Hamsherite sourcing on that clip, but it was too good not to share.

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