Blaming the victim

The Clarion Content favors school uniforms, we believe uniforms help improve focus and eliminate potential classroom distractions. However, we do not support draconian school dress codes, which are quite different than uniforms. These dress codes, rather than eliminate confusion and issues, exponentially increase them by setting up battles where youth, inherently, naturally, push the limits creating conflicts with parents, teachers and administrators.

It was during the debate on imposing a statewide (as a sidenote surely this is an issue to be addressed on the local, not the state level) dress code in Florida schools that we heard one of the most egregious cases of blame the victim we have ever heard.

In attempting to illustrate the need for a dress code with the case of an eleven year-old Texas girl who was gang-raped by more than a dozen men, Florida State Representative Kathleen Passidomo said, "There was an article about an eleven year-old girl who was gang-raped in Texas by eighteen young men because she was dressed like a twenty-one year-old prostitute. And her parents let her attend school like that. And I think it’s incumbent upon us to create some areas where students can be safe in school and show up in proper attire so what happened in Texas doesn’t happen to our students."

Wow!?! An eleven year-old kid, gang-raped by eighteen men and it was her fault because of how she was dressed?!? She had it coming? She wanted it? Eleven year-olds cannot consent to sex in this country. Period. We hope Representative Passidomo's constituents are calling for the resignation of this anti-feminist hater.

Read more here.

Jackie Robinson

How's about this one for a story we had never heard previously...

Social reformer and legendary baseball great, Jackie Robinson, who famously broke the color-line in what were, until then, the all-white Major Leagues, was once court-martialed for refusing to move to the back of an Army bus at Fort Hood, Texas. What!?! He was acquitted on all charges, but that was surely a story the Clarion Content had never heard about Robinson.

He had also been turned away when he tried to play for the Army base baseball team at Ft. Riley, Kansas. He was told to report instead to "the colored team," which, of course, did not exist, a Jim Crow joke.

Ugly, but a story that bears repeating, as it only happened sixty years or so ago.

Found on Foreign Policy.com.

A very different picture

When our lead political editor was a Cold War kid, this picture consisted of three white males, every year, year, after year. The picture has changed for sure. Has America come as far down the road? Surveys of racism indicate that it has declined. The pollsters believe our attitudes toward women have changed, too. Do we believe them? Have moved as far forward as a society as the picture makes it look like we have?

Differences

There are many differences between the Obama presidency and the reign of George Bush the II. One of them is that if someone had done this during the Bush II presidency, they would have been water-boarded in the search for co-conspirators, then locked up in a foreign prison beyond the reach of the United States' Constitution.

According to the Los Angeles Times and numerous other sources, "The Secret Service launched an investigation into a Facebook poll asking if President Obama should be assassinated." The paper reported that "The question, "Should Obama be killed?" had received 730 responses since its posting on Saturday. The four possible answers: Yes. Maybe. If he cuts my healthcare. No."

Wow! Bush engendered a heckuva lot of hostility, be wethinks nobody was getting away with that without facing the wrath of Dick Cheney.

Read the whole story here.

South Carolina's Republicans

The smiling face of the South Carolina GOP

The ever moderate and broad minded Republicans of South Carolina are at it again. Republican activist Rusty DePass reprised one of the oldest racist lines in the book on his Facebook page, over the weekend. The story was after a gorilla escaped from a zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, DePass took the time out to change his Facebook status to, "I'm sure it's just one of Michelle's ancestors - probably harmless," referring to the First Lady. Must be a pleasure for Senator Lindsey Graham and his ilk to be associated with progressive thinkers like Mr. DePass. Though we must query, what's with the ape reference we thought these guys didn't believe in evolution?

Read more here at Politics Daily.

A post on the Post

The Clarion Content has observed the controversy surrounding the cartoon published last week in the New York Post from afar. We will not be linking to it directly. Here in Durham we have been unable to formulate a coherent perspective on the situation. Luckily we have a guest columnist from Morris County, New Jersey with a short take. Take it away AnthemSled...

It seems to me the real story here is that the Post, full of sour grapes and slouching towards irrelevance, decided to print this [cartoon] knowing that they could bait their favorite punching bag Al Sharpton into criticizing them for something they could defend with a shrug, "We're not racist, just obtuse and unfunny!" meanwhile helping white males to feel like they are the ones being persecuted. I can't really boycott the Post, cause I never buy it anyway.

The tragedy here is that all the lefty vehemence against the Post right now is giving them exactly what they were looking for - publicity.

Links do not imply endorsement. Food for thought only...

Wow

Wow, we guess the Republican National Committee (RNC) isn't too worried about the forces of political correctness. We make this bold statement on the heels of a candidate for chairman of the RNC's release of a song and video titled, "Barack, the Magic Negro." It is a parody of the old Peter, Paul and Mary song, "Puff, the Magic Dragon." It features such sensitive lyrics as, "Oh, Barack the Magic Negro, lives in D.C. The L.A. Times, they called him that 'cause he's black, but not authentically."

Wow!

It goes on, "The media sure loves this guy, a white interloper's dream!"

Guess the Republicans have written off the idea of getting any minority votes this century. Here is a link to the basis of their defense in the Drudge Report. It comes down to, well black commentators have made the accusation that Obama isn't black enough or he isn't from the hood, why can't we parody that? (Don Imus is spinning in his grave. Whaddya mean Imus isn't dead?)

Here is the link to the original LA Times piece that discussed president-elect Obama and the American archetype of the Magic Negro. It is a daring and provocative article written in 2007 during the Democratic presidential primary race by an African-American author. It speculates on the concept that support for Obama might have roots in collective white guilt. It uses much of the phraseology that the RNC parody song later picks up.

The Clarion Content thought Obama did a marvelous job of addressing these issues head on in his speech on race in Philadelphia during the campaign. It wasn't the safe or politically correct thing to do, making that speech. It was brave. It was honest. It took on issues rarely raised outside the privacy of American homes, like white anger with affirmative action, like black anger at institutionalized racism. It faced down the falsehood that the racial politics of both sides stoke, that progress is a zero sum game; my gain comes only via your loss. Bullshit, sayeth the president-elect and we believe.

The Clarion Content did wonder if Obama's demographic background helped him with the American electorate, but from a very different angle than the LA Times piece. We were more focused on whether Obama's mixed race and relative youth vibed with an American youth culture that pictures him looking a lot like the future of the country. Did his background make him seem extra cool, even hip? Especially faced off against an array of old white men and the permanently stodgy Hillary Clinton?

Here is a link to the "Barack, the Magic Negro" video.

Grist for the mill

Some links to things we have been following, reading on, or just happened across recently...



Custom Made Cop Cars
Read here about the E7 from Carbon Motors. The first custom made for the cops, cop car. No modified, retrofitted Crown Victorias, Tauruses or Impalas here, no Mustangs either, this baby has more in common with the recently revived Knight Rider car or the Batmobile. As the company's CEO says, "You would never send a pickup truck to go put out a fire. Why would you send a family sedan to go take care of a homeland-security issue?"

Bill Richardson facing objections
High profile Chinese-American activists are opposing President-elect Barack Obama's nomination of Bill Richardson as Commerce Secretary. Richardson was famously involved during his tenure as Bill Clinton's Energy Secretary with the high profile spying case against Taiwanese-American Wen Ho Lee. Lee worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory and was investigated for passing nuclear secrets to China. He always denied the charges, and although the man wouldn't let him off completely, obliging him to plead guilty to one felony count of downloading sensitive material, the presiding judge at his trial said 99 percent of what he was accused of passing was in the public domain. Richardson led what felt like a witch hunt at the time. He fired Lee and was the first to publicly name Lee as being under suspicion of espionage. Richardson has, "acknowledged the government made "some mistakes" in the Lee case," read more here in the San Jose Mercury News, incidentally a brilliant newspaper.

Get your surgery done in India
This one we saw in the New York Time's Health section a while back, talk about globalization. The health insurance company Wellpoint is trying out a pilot project at Serigraph, a huge printing company in Wisconsin. The program offers insured members the option of flying to India for elective surgery, with no out-of-pocket medical costs and free travel for both the patient and a plus one. Serigraph also has offices in India and the Times says, many of its employees are familiar with India. It quotes Dr. Razia Hashmi, chief medical officer for national accounts for Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which is affiliated with Wellpoint, "Knee surgery that costs $70,000 to $80,000 in the United States can be performed in India for $8,000 to $10,000, including follow-up care and rehabilitation. The quality is comparable to care provided in the United States, Dr. Hashmi said. All the physicians speak English, and patients can share their medical records and consult with a surgeon in India before making the trip." Read the original article here.

It's A New Day

Follow this link to a neat new Obama related ditty, "It's A New Day" by will.i.am. The song is well constructed, the video is even better.

This link is to eleven interesting reactions to Obama's election, published in Seattle's The Stranger, including why it is now weird to wear a shirt with Obama's mug on it.

Special thanks to the Durhamanians who sent this stuff our way.

Obama perspective

Local NC free sheet the Independent Weekly featured a couple of Obama election reaction quotes that reiterated why the Clarion Content endorsed Obama.

The first is from a North Carolina delegate to the Democratic National Convention. His name is John Verdejo. He is a twenty-nine year-old, Raleigh native, from a single parent family. He was raised in the South Bronx until he was fourteen. Reacting to Obama's election Verdejo said, "[it] is going to force us to look at ourselves. We can no longer use the excuse of "because of my skin color, I can't be anything I want to be.""

The second is from a local mother of two girls, one only eight months old. The mom's name is Stacy Scott. She was quoted at a Durham, NC Obama victory rally that she attended with both kids as saying, "If he [Obama] wins tonight, if he can do this, then I can tell my kids tomorrow that anything is possible."

Ever offensive

Ever offensive, Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, patronizingly referred to President-elect Obama as "young, handsome and even tanned." He probably thought he could get away with it because he was in Russia after meeting with Vladimir Putin. Berlusconi has a long checkered history of inappropriate remarks, usually more likely to be sexist than racist, but prejudice is as prejudice does. Sadly, Obama will probably have to face down this kind of discrimination more than once in an anti-African American Europe. Italy and its Prime Minister may be an extreme example, but surely they are not alone. In addition to his morally questionable mindset, Berlusconi has a long history of shady financial deals (and possible organized crime links) in his past.

Obama, the white male vote, and the mandate

You may recall that last week on the main Clarion Content page we were discussing the virulent anger of some McCain-Palin supporters, and how race would factor in the presidential race. In a nuanced piece in this week's New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai addresses the issue head-on in an article titled, "Will Gun-Toting, Churchgoing White Guys Pull the Lever for Barack Obama?" He pulls out important threads, reminding readers that a very white Senator John Kerry lost the white male vote nationally by 25% according to exit polling. He notes that, "In three states — Texas, Indiana and North Carolina — more people voted in Democratic primaries this year than voted for Kerry on Election Day in 2004."

He concedes that, of course, Obama's priority is winning the election. However he carefully follows and artfully interviews the candidate on the issue of an election mandate. No more of Bush II's arrogant, divisive stance that, "50% plus exactly one vote empowers me to do whatever I want." He says that, "Obama’s central argument about American politics [is] this notion that the cultural fault line in the electorate can somehow be bridged by a generational change in leadership." Bai follows that up quoting Obama to the effect that this cultural fault line is exploited by a relentlessly profit driven media, "...there is an entire industry now, an entire apparatus, designed to perpetuate this cultural schism, and it’s powerful." Bai reminds us that this was an issue Obama wanted to fight as far back as the 2004 convention speech that introduced him to many folks, "when he talked about worshiping 'an awesome God in the blue states' and having 'gay friends in the red states.'" Obama is quoted saying that the cultural divide, the surrounding anger, and partisanship has been the impassable blockade that has prevented action on so many big issues, "if voters are similarly polarized and if they’re seeing two different realities, a Sean Hannity reality and a Keith Olbermann reality, then we’re not going to be able to get done the work we need to get done.” The Clarion agrees.

No matter who wins there are issues that have to be addressed. Among them: immigration, (which neither candidate is talking about,) the coming retirement of the boomers and the strain on Social Security and Medicare, (which McCain at least mentioned in the last debate) and farm subsidies and their brutal effect on the world's poorest. Some issues will always be partisan, some people will always disagree with any course of policy. The Clarion's hope, whichever candidate wins on November 4th, is that America will get a leader who wants to unite people, to raise them up and bring out their best selves, not a leader who uses his election to divide people and bring out their worst, smallest selves.

Let us abandon the myopia of, "I win, therefore, you lose."

Protest Song

A strong video questioning the Bush II administration.

WARNING GRAPHIC

Excerpts from Obama's Philadelphia 2008 speech on Race

[the times...]...reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

Immortal Technique---Harlem Streets

Corey Booker's words

We offer for your perusal a special Corey Booker edition of Pithy F*rging Sayings.

First, here he is paraphrasing Dr. Martin Luther King,

"The problems of today are not the vitriolic words and the evil actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people."

Here in his own words,

"We need a prophetic leader--somebody who can raise us above our baser angels and show that we are all tied in a common garment of destiny."

"People say white people have difficulty speaking about race? America has difficulty speaking about race. People--black and white--who can't fit me into their comfortable paradigm for how I should be get uncomfortable. I'm going to continue being me. I am going to be as authentically and unapologetically me as possible."

"I am a raging idealist, and I think that's a good thing."

"True leadership is not exhibited by how many people one can get to follow but by how many people join together in leading."

"It's all about the energy, and the more you throw positive energy and unconditional love in the world, the more its going to hit and stick."

Booker, a native New Jerseyian, was an All-American tight end at Standford, who subsequently went on to Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar and then graduated Yale Law.

Follow this link to old, pithy sayings posts.

These quotes primarily came from an Esquire article about Booker which reaffirmed the Clarion's conviction in this amazing person. (The Clarion and Esquire have both been on the Booker bandwagon for years.)

What is now possible in America

This is not an endorsement.

Obama's speech on race in America