Oct

31

Some Thoughts on the Model Minority Myth

Filed Under Black/African American Issues, Race and Racism, Sociology | 28 Comments

As promised, I’m addressing questions I got on my first post.

Ann: “What are your thoughts/comments on the Myth of the Model Minority (Asians)?”

I can’t address all the other questions that were depending on that one without sounding like an Asian-American studies primer (which I’m not well-read in, anyway, although this book is a good intro) but I’ll touch on a few things.

First off, I can’t really speak for Asian-Americans, as we’re a diverse group, and also extremely fractious. Some of us have been here hundreds of years, others just arrived, different languages, religions, philosophies, politics, views on race and ethnicity, etcetera. Second, I don’t think the myth of Asians being the model minority has really hurt black people, because if Asians didn’t exist, racists would just use some other group. In fact, I think before Asians were as visible, Italian- and Irish-Americans were used as similarly irrelevant examples of why black people “couldn’t get ahead”. I think the Good One and the Bad One are static positions that can be filled with various different kinds of people depending on time and place. That gives me an idea I’ll elaborate a little bit later.

Many Asians — specifically, East Asians who immigrated in the later 20th century — are, in fact, relatively advantaged, due to arriving with decent amounts of economic and social capital. The model minority stereotype is still damaging to East Asians, but I have a feeling that the people who are damaged more than anyone else are certain Southeast Asian subgroups… the ones that are not so advantaged. I remember reading a horrifying article about children of Cambodian refugees in a certain California city. The parents suffered so much from PTSD that they holed up in public housing, turned into shells of their former selves and retreated from any kind of public life. Their children had the highest dropout rates in the city and were sinking into drug addiction and gang warfare. The representatives of authority — social worker, police officer, college counselor — took a long time to understand that there was even a problem. “They’re Asians… why aren’t they succeeding?”

Getting back to the eternal Good versus Bad, I’ll advance an argument for why the model minority is such a compelling element of racist mythology.

Let’s say you (any reader of any race) have two sisters. Your older sister has two sons. She’s a responsible, ethical woman and an excellent mother. She raises her children in the best possible way. They grow up with love, realistic boundaries, strong values and get the best education there is.

Your younger sister is the opposite. Despite all attempts to help her, she’s lazy, dysfunctional, selfish and cruel. She has two sons of her own, and she abuses them physically and emotionally when she doesn’t completely neglect them.

Your nephews grow up into young men. Your older sister, the good mother, has one son who takes after her, and he becomes a professional active in community service. The other one turns into a mean, bank-robbing, puppy-kicking kind of guy. Your younger sister, the bad mother, has one son that turns out just like her (a mean, bank-robbing, puppy-kicking kind of guy) and another that manages to overcome the abuse and become just as successful as his successful cousin.

Which nephew are you going to admire the most? That’s easy, the one who overcame the odds. The good son of the bad mother. The one which you scorn the most is, of course, the bad son of the good mother. He has no excuse. He had it all, and he threw it away.

It’s a pretty universal way to feel. We make judgments about familiar people in our lives based on their actions and our knowledge of their upbringing and history. It’s not illogical at all.

Where it goes wrong is when we apply magical thinking…

Magical thinking takes things that are not people and turns them into people. For example, a sailor who wants a safe journey sacrifices a small object to the sea.

Magical thinking takes the good son of the bad mother, or the bad son of the good mother, and pretends that this figure can adequately represent, explain and judge a group of millions of people who have some similarities in, say, eye shape or nose length or hair color, but are otherwise of totally distinct personalities and backgrounds.

The worst part is that people who do this don’t understand that it’s magical thinking. They call it things like “common sense” and “facing the facts” and “being politically incorrect”. Instead of using logic, theories, a sociological imagination, a complex understanding of the way groups of peoples and individuals and history interact, they just close their eyes and think they already knew it all from the beginning.

Magical thinking is contradictory, but simple, because it’s all in black and white. Individuals are easy to understand. They’re either wholly in control of their destinies, or completely passive and unable to control their destinies, but nothing in between. They can be sainted victims, or they can be villains.

A tidy little family drama explains everything. America used to be a bad mother. That was during the civil rights era. But black people proved that they were the good son of the bad mother. Then America got better. Now, the fact that America is a good mother is proved by the fact that she raised a good son… the Asian race! The black race (now the bad son) has a good mother, but he threw it all away. He keeps complaining, but everyone knows the complaints are groundless. It’s common sense.

The good son is very useful, both because he proves the goodness of the mother, and makes the other son look bad (interpretation: there is no more true racism in America. Those who complain about racism are the real racists). Let’s say we flip the case and concede that the mother is bad. Even if the mother is bad, the good son succeeds by sheer force of admirable character. The bad son must, therefore, be lacking in character. (interpretation: “survival of the fittest” social Darwinism, old-style quasi-scientific biology-based racism in which the black race is deficient in intellect but physically endowed, whereas Asians are gifted with cleverness but lack the deeper wisdom of the white man).

Getting back to more real examples in the real world, this model explains why Asian complaints about racism are so routinely deprecated and ignored. “What, that joke about eating cats wasn’t funny?” “Hey, why weren’t you flattered when I compared you to a prostitute?” To a typical magical thinker, the thought of Asians complaining about anything is almost impossible to imagine. Also, it explains the weird, random compliments so often given to Asians. “You know, I really admire you people”. Oooookay.

When I’m talking about magical thinkers I’m talking about anyone who is infected to any degree by racism, mostly white but of course potentially anyone, of any race. You may think you’re walking around being a unique individual, but that stranger down the street thinks they’re like your aunt or uncle. They already know you. They’ve already judged you. They think they’ve known you from the very beginning…

In closing, Happy Halloween to all! Unless you’re going to wear a geisha costume, in which case I hope you trip on a pumpkin.

Oct

31

Bunch-O-Links

Filed Under Bunch-O-Links | 6 Comments

1. Eric on the Discovery Channel’s white guys.

2. C.N. Le on Asian Americans and political loyalty. Well actually the post is about Bobby Jindal’s election, but I thought the last part was most interesting.

3. Donna of Silence of Our Friends is back! I couldn’t pick just one post, so you can go read all of them.

4. Field Negro makes in into the LA Times.

5. Kai on the White Liberal Conundrum.

6. Ann has updates on the victim in the West Virginia racist, rape, torture case.

7. Buster reports on Vladimir Putin’s desire to make his sports teams look less African.

8. P6 has a write up, breaking down some anti-Jena 6 articles.

9. Mandolin spent something like 10 years working on this post about the diversity of feminisms. (Ok, I’m embellishing a little. It may not have taken 10 years, but I know it took quite a while.)

10. Angry Black Woman wrote a post about National Public Radio, and got a response from them. I’m looking forward to her reaction to that letter. I have my own response formulated in my head. I’m curious what she’s feeling. For those who don’t know, I am a true lover of public radio, and I think her criticism is fair. Update: She actually did respond in the comments. I thought she was going to put up a full post.? That’s what I get for cherry picking comments.

Oct

29

Can Someone Please Help This Deluded Nigerian?

Filed Under Uncategorized | 12 Comments

I got a lovely email today from one of my detractors, and he forwarded me this article.? I guess the “Rachel Critic” was trying to prove black people really are inferior, and he found a black person who said this, which tickled his heart.? The article is written by a Nigerian guy (who might as well be related to the now banned Vijay Coomar). Here is a quote:

A few days ago, the Nobel Laureate, Dr James Watson, made a remark that is now generating worldwide uproar, especially among the blacks.

He said what to me looks like a self-evident truth. He told The Sunday Times of London in an interview that in his humble opinion, black people are less intelligent than the White people.

Since then, some of us cannot hear anything else but the outrage of black people who feel demeaned by what Watson has said. So many people have called the man names. To be expected, some have said he is a racist. Some even wonder how a “foolish” man like Watson could have won the Nobel Prize. Even white people who, deep in their heart, agree with Watson want to be politically, correct so they condemn the man.

Why are we blacks becoming so reactive, so sensitive to any remarks, no matter how well-meaning, about our failure as a race? Why are we becoming like the Jews who see every accusation as a manifestation of anti-Semitism? I do not know what constitutes intelligence. I leave that to our so-called scholars. But I do know that in terms of organising society for the benefit of the people living in it, we blacks have not shown any intelligence in that direction at all. I am so ashamed of this and sometimes feel that I ought to have belonged to another race.

Nigeria my dear country is a prime example of the inferiority of the black race when compared to other races. Let somebody please tell me whether it is a manifestation of intelligence if a people cannot organise a free, fair and credible election to choose who will lead them. Is it intelligence that we cannot provide simple pipe-borne water for the people? Our public school system has virtually collapsed. Is that a sign of intelligence? Our roads are impassable. In spite of the numerous sources that nature has made available to us to tap for energy to run our industries and homes, we have no steady supply of electricity. Yet electricity is the bedrock of industrialisation. When you agree with the school of Watson, some say you are incorrect because all these failures are a result of poor leadership. Why must it be us blacks who must always suffer poor leadership? Is that not a manifestation of unintelligence?

Can somebody please tell me where they find these self-hating black people? It seems like newspapers and other media outlets go out of their way to give people of color with these reactionary views a platform.

Oct

29

There Are No Black People in Argentina

Filed Under Black/African American Issues, International Racism, Race and Racism | 41 Comments

This is a short post I originally wrote for my blog earlier this year, at the end of Black History month. I think it’s of interest to a wider audience. Also, it ties in with two things I talked about in my introduction post. Perpetual foreigner or caste-like native minority, who has it worse, and when do they have it worse, and if there’s a point to the comparison, how can it be made in a mutually productive and illuminating way?

As we see with the Afroargentinos, the two derogatory categories are not mutually exclusive.

—————

On this last day of Black History Month, I really couldn’t think of a good U.S. topic I could write on that hasn’t already been covered extensively in the blogs I read. Instead, I’m going to point out a little-known international black history topic: what happened to black people in Argentina.

The title of my post is intentionally misleading, because there are definitely black people in Argentina! There just aren’t that many of them. The Argentinian national identity is very European, and much more defined and crisp around the edges than is usual for an American country.

Like the U.S., the modern nation of Argentina established living room through ethnic cleansing and genocide of indigenous inhabitants, then combined different streams of immigrants to form a conglomerate identity. The difference is that there was a second wave of ethnic cleansing in the late 19th century that got rid of the large black population in the north of the country. Formerly, black people in Argentina had played a major economic and cultural role. The tango, for example, has roots in Africa.

From a review of the documentary “Afroargentinos”
Carlos Menem, whose ten-year tenure as Argentina’s president ended in 1999 just before his macroeconomic policies led to the collapse of the economy, was asked, during a tour of the United States, about whether Argentina had any citizens of African descent. He responded, “No, we have no blacks. Brazil has that problem.”

Something happened. No one is quite sure exactly what. The official version is that the black people just drifted off during a long war. This is wrong: there was a concerted effort to remove them, sponsored in large part by statesman Domingo Sarmiento. But exactly how they were removed is in doubt. Were they concentrated in quarantine areas without medicine and left to die during epidemics? Or simply taken from their homes, pushed over the border into Brazil and Uruguay and told never to come back?

Some of them remained. Here’s part of an interview with Fidel Nadal, former frontman of the Argentinian rock band Todos Tus Muertos. I’m sure not all Afroargentinos have taken his path: the complete rejection of national identity in favor of a transnational one. But these are the very raw words of someone who refuses to accept the official story.

From a 1998 interview (my typical clunky translation)

It happened I was born in Argentina, but I’m black and my nationality is African. My ancestors came from Africa in an illegal way, kidnapped, robbed, into slavery. If I said that I am Argentinian I would be accepting that illegal fact. And I don’t accept it. They kidnapped us, they mistreated us, and we still built their cities and gave them love in exchange for mistreatment. Also, when any person of the world sees me, they don’t believe me when I say I’m Argentinian. Once, in Peru, someone wanted to beat me up. “You’re Argentinean. I was in Argentina and there are no black people. Why are you lying to me?”. There, you realize that no matter that I’ve been born in Argentina, my nationality always is going to be Africa, because any person that sees me on the street says: “That black man, where is he from?”. In Africa, when they see a black man they don’t ask where he’s from, because that’s his house. But if you went to Africa, they would ask you, “Where are you from, white man?” Black people aren’t born from here, we come from Africa. It’s natural. And it’s natural for Europeans that a rasta speaks of rastafarianism. They’re surprised when I tell them that I was born in Argentina. They ask me: “Where are you from?” And I say: “I’m of Africa, but I was born in Argentina. How?” And I explain this same thing that I’m saying to you now. And they have to accept it. I don’t come from the family of the ambassador of the Congo in Argentina. No. My family went through five generations in slavery, making the streets, nursing children, fighting in the English invasions, forming what now is known as Argentina. If you don’t know where you come from, how do you know who you are and where you’re going? One thing is your original culture, and another one is imposed culture. You’ll say: if you’re of Africa and you think that it’s that way, why don’t you go there? I’ll tell you something: I go to Africa, but who pays me for all of that? Imagine it, I go over there and they start off: “Ahg, ug” and I say “Hey, what’s up”. “But what: you don’t know how to speak? What did you come here to do? What’s your family, what’s your last name? And me: “I don’t know. Nadal”. “But that’s not an African name.” “No, because it’s the last name of the family that enslaved me and made me take their name.” “But that makes you like a dog, not a human being,” theyll say to me… You don’t know your name, your last name, your language. You have nothing, neither home, nor family. The richest part of a man is his culture. But you’re a stranger in your own land. And neither are you from here. You’re seen as different because you are different. You’re black. Although you dye your hair blonde and put on contact lenses, they’re always going to shout at you from a truck: “Hey, black man, what are you doing.” I always knew that I was black; let’s say, since I was a little boy. When you went to school, you didn’t say: “Eh, I came there as white.” But they say to you all of a sudden: “Black!” and, above all, it’s to insult you. It’s crazy. Just like when I was a boy my father spoke to me of Malcolm X, Lumumba, leaders of Africa. And I hooked up with reggae because I looked at the album covers and said: “How I look like this type; my hair grows like that.” Sure, I lived in Almagro, but we were links on the same chain. And there was something familiar in that, as if I’d heard it before…

More links:

Oct

29

Introducing Guest Poster Atlasien

Filed Under Blogs Blogging Blogthropology, Demography, Family Issues, Race and Racism | 3 Comments

Greetings, Tavernites! My name is Atlasien, and Rachel has kindly invited me to guest blog for the month of November. I’m an Asian prospective adoptive parent living in Atlanta. My husband is white, Southern and Irish-Polish in origin. We’re in the middle of the loooooong process of adopting from the foster care system, while also trying the biological way.

My personal blog is called “Upside-Down Adoption”. The origin of the name is simple. I’m Asian, and Asians get adopted, but they don’t adoptor do they?

Here’s the rundown of my complicated family history, in the portentous manner of one of my guilty vices: James Michener novels. Let’s call it, “Hapa!” Those who find their eyes glazing over should jump to the next section, “Race!”, where I’ll talk about my personal focus on racial issues and introduce future guest blog topics.

Hapa!

Several thousand years ago a group of hunter-gatherers lived on an island chain. The islands were overflowing with natural bounty. They were aware of farming practices, but why bother, since their land was so rich? But one day the farmers from the mainland decided to move in. They killed most of the hunter-gatherers, drove the rest to the northernmost, coldest, bitterest island and began a long slow process of assimilation and cultural genocide.

Then, in the middle of the last century, a woman from that northern island had a son. The father died shortly thereafter; American forces sunk his battleship to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Life was very hard. Many children died of malnutrition. The mother gave her child up in an effort to save him, then quickly died. The child was placed with elderly parents in a village in the mountains. Life was still hard, but it started getting better. On one happy day, black and white television with sumo wrestling and Godzilla movies came to a house, and all the villagers crowded around the set. The boy grew up and became the first person in his adoptive clan to go to college. He left for the big city. Restless and curious, he never stopped moving. His country kept moving too; it changed all around him and became one of the richest in the world.

In 1606, on another island, a second son decided to seek his fortune. He joined a group of ambitious entrepreneurs to found a colony called Jamestown. The effort didn’t succeed, but he put down roots in the state of Virginia. His family joined together with other English and German families. They held themselves to be the chosen heirs to the land, superior to the black and Native residents, and built flimsy, eclectic thought structures to justify their continued separate and superior identity.

Through the centuries, some of the family fell down the class ladder and drifted through Kentucky as preachers and craftsmen, but they climbed back up when they settled again in West Virginia. The men were business owners and professionals, exhibiting a curious mix of blind willful prejudice and thoughtful, progressive intellectualism. The women had nannies and cooks, golfed, wrote long articulate letters to each other, drank cocktails and occasionally overdosed on barbiturates due to crushing depression. During the war, two people from that circle married and had two children. But after the war, the country club life began to crumble, along with the state economy. West Virginia was being strip-mined. The 1950s was a decade of exodus to the north.

The eldest daughter grew up in New England and became a political radical in college. She believed in the best of what her parents believed in, but looked for even more change. She left the country and began traveling the world, where she met my father. She traveled with him, and then tried to establish a life as a mother and housewife in Japan, but it just didn’t work. We ended up moving to America, a new country for me, and I became the American daughter of a single working mother.

Race!

As you can tell, I’m very involved in my family narrative. I’ve gone over it many times. As a multiracial person, I’ve never been able to take it for granted. It’s constantly questioned, praised, criticized and commented upon by others. I’ve had to constantly struggle to define myself and interpret my own story. One story constantly forced on me to this very day is that I’m the daughter of an Asian war bride and a white military officer. I believe that everyone — multiracial or not — has the right to their own story, accompanied by the responsibility to interpret it ethically.

My views on race have been formed both by personal experience, listening to the stories of others and also through academic study (although my career ended up leading me elsewhere). I’m glad to have found sites like this and Racialicious where intelligent conversation about race is actually possible. I don’t like Oppression Olympics. I do like taking a broad, global perspective on the intersection of class, race, gender, disability and other issues. And to a great degree, I’ve held that kind of stance from the very beginning of my childhood.

In America, I went to a mediocre public school in a lily-white district. The results were painful. I was pulled out at the age of 14, and I think if I’d stayed in a few months longer, I might have had a complete mental breakdown. I’ve written a lot about those experiences, but I still have a lot left in me. Anyway, as I was growing up, I thought about suffering a lot, and about how other people suffered. Did I have a right to complain? Did the others? Did we complain, and if we did, who heard us?

I had a conflicting set of feelings towards the tiny group of black girls at the school. We lived in a region where black people were highly segregated and mostly belonged to the lowest class. First of all, I was afraid of them. They looked tough. Some of them were nice, but some of them bullied me and called me racist slurs. Second, I felt a solidarity with them. I understood that for some as yet unknown reason, the world was divided into “white” and “everything else” and we were firmly on the “everything else” side. Third, I envied them. The white kids were scared of them, and I wished they were more scared of me. Fourth, I felt sorry for them. Though their commanding physical presence insulated them from the attacks I received on a daily basis, I knew in the wider world they would be at a disadvantage. My status as a freakish perpetual foreigner would be less of a handicap than their status of lower-caste native minority.

Today, I live in Atlanta, a city with a thriving black middle and upper class, co-existing (sometimes uneasily) with the more inner-city black lower class, African and Asian immigrants, a massive population of newly arrived Mexicans, traditional Southern whites and progressive Southern whites and Yankee/Western transplants. The other prospective adoptive parents I know here are almost all black, some African-American and some Caribbean. I still use the tools I picked up as a child to understand and navigate this complicated environment and the even more complicated environment of global adoption politics.

During my guest stint I’m going to be posting some older pieces from my archives, pieces which have to do with race and politics and fit in nicely here. I’ll do a new post about myths and realities of black adoptive parents, and aggregate some recent posts I made about the resentment faced by Chinese-American international adoptive parents into a new article designed for this site. I might post a rambling autobiographical piece about race, genealogy and national identity. I’m an avid reader of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project report, and the new issue has a couple of hot items I’d like to discuss. One media-related idea I’m working is going to be called “Good White Savior Movies, Bad White Savior Movies”. If you have any burning questions or requests for me to write about something I haven’t mentioned, post it here in the comments. Oh yes, and the Wapanese I have a lot to say about the Wapanese. I don’t like them. If you don’t know about the Wapanese, you WILL be educated! Stay tuned! And thanks, Rachel, for the spot!

Oct

29

Erase Racism is Up at Kill Bigotry

Filed Under Racism Round-Up | Leave a Comment

Charles has posted the 18th Erase Racism Carnival over at Kill Bigotry! As usual we have great submissions.

Here is the schedule for the next 3 months. January is still open if anyone is interested in hosting. For more information about the carnival, check out the carnival’s home page at Ally Work.

November 2007 @ Eric Stoller
December 2007 @ Present Progressive Mood
January 2008 @ open

Oct

28

Serious Question…for Everyone

Filed Under Race and Racism, Serious Questions | 11 Comments

Over the past 10 years (give or take a few years) do you think racism in the US has lessened, increased, or stayed the same?

Do you think there may be some areas where we have become less racist and others where we have gotten more racist? If so what areas do you see changes for the better or worse? If you think it has gotten more or less racist, what evidence would you cite to support your view?

Oct

26

Racism Mars Swiss Election

Filed Under International Racism, Politics | 6 Comments

You can check out the full article here:

The nationalist Swiss People’s Party received the highest vote ever recorded for an individual political party in Switzerland, after a bitter campaign in which it blamed foreigners for much of the crime in the country, according to official results released Monday.
The Federal Statistics Office estimated that the party had won 29 percent of the vote in national parliamentary elections Sunday. That topped the 1919 performance of 28 percent achieved by the pro-business Radical Democrats.

The Social Democrats, the second-largest party, dropped to 19.5 percent from 23.3 percent.

The People’s Party added 7 seats to bring to 62 its total in the 200-seat National Council, the lower house of Parliament. The Green Party added 6 seats to its 2003 performance, bringing its total to 20. It was the Green Party’s best showing, reflecting concerns on the left for the environment.

Even in a campaign considered by many to be tainted with racism and xenophobia, the Swiss elected their first black Parliament member Sunda: Ricardo Lumengo of the Social Democrats, an Angolan who arrived in Switzerland as an asylum seeker in the 1980s and subsequently became a legal expert.

Oct

25

New York Times Article on Nooses

Filed Under Black/African American Issues, Race and Racism, Racism Round-Up, Sociology | 16 Comments

This weekend Carmen and I were interviewed by the New York Times about the recent rash of noose threats. Here is the link to the article and a few quotes from the article.

At least seven times in the past few weeks, nooses have been anonymously tossed over pipes or hung on doorknobs in the New York metropolitan area four times here on Long Island, twice in New York City, once at a Home Depot store in Passaic, N.J. The settings are disparate. One noose was hung in a police station locker room in Hempstead, where the apparent target was a black police officer recently promoted to deputy chief. Another was draped over the doorknob of the office of a black professor at Columbia University.

The question of why these things were happening whether linked to events somewhere else, like in Jena, La., or part of some new homegrown vernacular of race hate seemed to wait in line last week behind the question of where the next noose would be found.

Three noose episodes took place on Long Island in three days. On Wednesday, two were found at a sanitation garage in the Town of Hempstead one of them looped around the neck of a stuffed animal with its face blackened. On Thursday, a noose was discovered hanging in a Nassau County highway department yard in Baldwin. On Friday, a worker at the Green Acres shopping mall in Valley Stream found one slung over a door at a construction site.

Here they describe the history of Long Island, and we have Carmen’s quote:

Like many other parts of the country, Long Island is not without a history of racial bigotry. Black people were barred from buying homes in Levittown until well into the 1960s. Some Long Island school districts are still among the most segregated in the country. The black population is about 12 percent of the total, but is highly concentrated in a half-dozen communities that are 95 percent minority. In 2004, in Suffolk County, it was still possible for an interracial couple to wake up in the night to find a cross burning on their lawn it happened in a hamlet called Lake Grove.

Lynching was not part of that history. But to some of those sifting the evidence, the nooses of 2007 represent much the same impulse as lynchings did in the Jim Crow South.

In the context of today, the noose means, There is still a racial hierarchy in this country, and you better not overstep your bounds, said Carmen Van Kerckhove, the founder of a New York consulting firm, New Demographic, that specializes in workplace problems, including racial tension.

Here’s one of the men who was threatened with a noose with my quote at the end:

Willie Warren, an equipment operator at the Nassau County Public Works yard here, was among three workers in the garage on Thursday when an employee ran in to tell them he had found a noose hanging from a fence outside. Mr. Warren, 41, who has been with the department for 20 years, filed a racial discrimination suit in 2004, producing tape recordings of a supervisor referring to him with racial epithets. He won the case, got a promotion, still works for one of the supervisors named in his suit, and considers himself unflappable on the job.

The noose shook him. Its hard to explain, but it made me upset the whole day, Mr. Warren said. One white co-worker was as upset as he was, he said. Another said, Whats the big deal? Its only a noose.

Rachel E. Sullivan, an assistant professor of sociology at Long Island Universitys C. W. Post College, said most people do not understand what lynchings were. They think it was a few guys coming in the night, in their hooded sheets, taking you away, she said.

She teaches a course on African-American history, including the killings of thousands by lynching in the United States between the end of the Civil War and the end of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

But in reality these were whole, big community events, she said. Children and families would come to watch. Hundreds of people attended. They would watch a man being burned and mutilated before he was hung. They would pose for pictures with the body.

If people had a grasp of what really happened at these things, Professor Sullivan continued, they would understand the power of the symbol of a noose.

You can read the whole article at the link above.

Oct

24

Rissi Palmer

Filed Under Black/African American Issues, Pop Culture | 12 Comments

You might want to check this artist out–she’s a black female country artist. It’s rare to see black women in country music (in spite of the fact that country music has it’s roots in the blues and other forms of music heavily influenced by African Americans.) Well, to be honest, I don’t know of any black women country artists. It’s doesn’t mean there aren’t any. I just don’t know of any.1 There is a current black male artist who goes by the name Cowboy Troy, and his music is…uh…uh…not too good (well in my view it’s bad). And of course, Charley Pride was a very talented country singer, but we talking about men here.

Here’s Ms. Palmer’s video.

To be honest I don’t like the song, but maybe she has some other nice songs. I don’t like many pop country songs. I prefer the more old school or blue grass inspired country music.

What do you think?

Editor’s Note: It appears Orville Lloyd Douglas beat to the punch in posting on Ms. Palmer. That what happens when you leave a post in the queue for 4 days; other good bloggers beat you to the punch.

Editor’s Note 2: For anybody who is interested in the connection between R&B, blues, country, and gospel, which I alluded to above. There is a fabulous and highly underrated album released in the 1990s called Rhythm, Country, and Blues. If you don’t believe me, just check out the Amazon.com ratings. It has the following songs and pairings:

1. Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing – Vince Gill/Gladys Knight
2. Funny How Time Slips Away – Al Green/Lyle Lovett
3. I Fall To Pieces – Aaron Neville/Trisha Yearwood
4. Somethin’ Else – Little Richard/Tanya Tucker
5. When Something Is Wrong With My Baby – Patti LaBelle/Travis Tritt
6. Rainy Night In Georgia – Sam Moore/Conway Twitty
7. Chain Of Fools – Clint Black/Pointer Sisters
8. Since I Fell For You – Natalie Cole/Reba McEntire
9. Southern Nights – Chet Atkins/Allen Toussaint
10. The Weight – Staple Singers/Marty Stuart
11. Patches – George Jones/B.B. King

My personal favorite is the Patti Labelle and Travis Tritt song, but the last two are also really good.

  1. I’m defining “country” very narrowly here as contemporary country music. [back]

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