Here is a thoughtful and interesting blog post. It's about what to do when people who you think should be on your side fail you - and who hasn't had that happen, on a national-politician scale, right on down to close family members - but also there is a list of ways to act when you've hurt someone's feelings through unthinking racism, sexism, whateverism. It's actually just a list of ways to act when you're having a conversation with someone whose experiences you don't share, starting with opening your ears and closing your mouth.

Frequently I read blogs written by people with whose politics I don't agree. I run across posts that have me rolling my eyes, of course, and I run across posts that cause me to think new thoughts, which is a major reason why I read those. I also run across posts that I think make excellent points, independently of any political content.

I think that in some ways white women make a bridge for privilege/non-privilege. Perhaps especially white women who were raised in the south and expected to be ladylike and not make waves. You can achieve, but you aren't supposed to make a big show or a spectacle of yourself. But in the workplace, achieving frequently isn't enough. You have to put yourself forward, even if it feels immodest or audacious or inappropriate or uncomfortable, and it's probably hard for certain segments of the population to understand that somebody could ever feel that way, let alone anticipate it, empathize, or know what to do about it.

I remember when we terminated the coworker I've written about before. He left a spot in the chemist rank, which we wanted to fill by promoting a black female technician named Libby. I'd worked with her while we were trying to save his job, and had discovered that she had chemist potential. Like most of our techs, she had a science degree, but more than that, she was very smart and curious and cared a lot about getting the job done right. But when I told Libby that the boss and I wanted her to apply for that job, she kept saying that she didn't want to do it. She didn't think she could do it, I thought, and I knew better. I kept encouraging her to put in for it, she kept not wanting to, and I finally told her - "you're doing the work, you might as well get the pay." That made sense, she applied, and we promoted her. (She turned out to be one of the most productive chemists we ever had, besides personality-wise being a pure delight to work with.)

All of the techs shared an office, sharing desks as people came and went on their shifts, but the chemists shared separate offices, two by two. The desk left by the man we terminated was in an office that he shared with another white male chemist, Randy. I told Libby to get her stuff and move into that desk, and once again, she held back. She would just stay with the techs - she would be more comfortable.

Now let me stop here and say that in a situation like this you have to be really almost a mind-reader. You can't bully people into leaving their comfort zone so far that they are stressed out and actually fail at what you're pushing them to do. On the other hand, some people have been trained to hold themselves back and if you care about them, you have to bust them out of that. One clue that I had was that Libby had told me that her mother had said she must major in education or social work - that "they" would never let her get anywhere with a degree in biology. She was surprised when we hired Libby on as a tech, and very surprised when we promoted her. "You be nice to those white folks," she told Libby, "they've been good to you." We aren't being nice, I told her, we promoted you because we thought you could do the job.

So I told her: "You have a chemist job. You get a chemist paycheck. You go to chemist meetings. You sit at a chemist desk. Get your stuff." She still didn't want to.

"Why not, for pete's sake?"

"Because Randy won't want me in there," she finally said.

"Why don't you think Randy will want you in there?" I asked.

Silence.

"Is it because Randy's white? You're prejudiced against Randy because he's white?"

"I'm not prejudiced!" Libby protested.

"Then get your stuff!"

So Libby moved into that office, and of course she and Randy got on like a house afire. He's a very nice person, easy to get along with. I wouldn't have put her in an office where anyone would have been ugly to her.

Was I bullying her? Probably. I don't know what to do in situations like that except to think with my head, and feel with my heart, and act, and hope for the best. And, as the writer of the linked blog post says, educate myself as much as possible as to how other people's experiences affect them, not expecting other people to be like me. Ignore the buzzwords that tell me I've left my comfort zone of political thought that I agree with, and have an open mind about stuff. It's not easy but you have to do it to be a righteous person, I reckon.

I want to talk about abortion again.
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I posted here in a blurb about embryonic stem cell research, how I arrived at my pro-life views from a scientific perspective. But there's a societal perspective too. Here is another mostly direct quote from a comment I've left elsewhere.

I think the abortion issue goes back to a fundamental lack of respect for human life and a reluctance to provide protection for helpless humans whose existence is inconvenient, and who we don't have to look at so we can disconnect our emotions (hearts). I think there is a continuum from a complacency about abortion, to babies getting knocked in the head or shaken for crying (see the occasional article in any urban newspaper), to toddlers being beaten to death over toilet training (ditto), to people being killed during robberies or drive-bys or just because someone thinks he's been "disrespected" as if lack of respect weren't the fundamental problem in the first place. I think when we made it legal for women to delete their unborn just because they didn't want them, we encouraged this whole domino effect thing.

Yes, I know people have always committed murder, and sadly, even murder of babies and children. But I really do think there is a culture of death and things are worse now than they were. For instance, when my daughter graduated from high school and went off to college in 2005, after a couple of months she remarked to me with some surprise that she hadn't seen any fights yet. I saw exactly one fight during my entire high school career, and that one was sponsored by a couple of teachers who were trying to settle a feud between two boys (no, it didn't work). Do you remember school shootings when you were a kid? I sure don't. I carried a pocket knife to school on occasion; no one cared about such things back then because they had no need to.

Why are people so violent nowadays? Is it the crap we see on TV all the time, and in the movies, and the music? Maybe, but I still draw a line from dehumanizing the unborn to devaluing all human life. Feel free to disagree. But this is where I stand.

(BTW, if anyone thinks this is exclusively a religious point of view - I personally know two atheists who oppose abortion: one because he thinks it is immoral, and one because he thinks it is bad for society.)

One of the things that so profoundly disappoints me about Pres. Obama's adamantly pro-choice view is the fact that statistically, black babies are almost four times as likely as white babies to be killed in the womb. From the Guttmacher Institute:

The overall abortion rate is 21 per 1,000 U.S. women (i.e., each year 2.1% of all women of reproductive age have an abortion). Black and Hispanic women have higher abortion rates than non-Hispanic white women do. (The rates are 49 per 1,000 and 33 per 1,000 among black and Hispanic women, respectively, vs. 13 per 1,000 among non-Hispanic white women.)

Is this in line with these statistics?

Racial differences exist, with blacks disproportionately represented among homicide victims and offenders

In 2005, homicide victimization rates for blacks were 6 times higher than the rates for whites.

Looks that way to me.

We have a black president. He has the bully pulpit and the unblinking attention of all kinds of people, but in particular young black folks. How wonderful if he would appeal to them: Let's stop killing each other and start valuing each other, starting with the most helpless and vulnerable: our brothers and sisters in the womb.

MLK Day 2009

I was thinking today about complaints that King "had" to be given his own holiday, or rather that "they" had to get "their" own holiday, and scrunch our precious founding fathers together into President's day, and somehow this little passage came to mind.

[T]he body does not consist of only one part, but of many. If the foot says, “Since I'm not a hand, I'm not part of the body,” that does not make it any less a part of the body, does it? And if the ear says, “Since I'm not an eye, I'm not part of the body,” that does not make it any less a part of the body, does it? If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But now God has arranged the parts, every one of them, in the body according to his plan. Now if all of it were one part, there wouldn’t be a body, would there? So there are many parts, but one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don't need you,” or the head to the feet, “I don't need you.” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are in fact indispensable, and the parts of the body that we think are less honorable are treated with special honor, and we make our less attractive parts more attractive. However, our attractive parts don't need this. But God has put the body together and has given special honor to the parts that lack it, so that there might be no disharmony in the body, but that its parts should have the same concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it. If one part is praised, every part rejoices with it.

I Cor. 12 14-26

There isn't any "they". There can't be if we're to survive and flourish. There can only be "us" and we have to make sure that no one is excluded.

Joanne Jacobs: Can Obama help black boys?".

Black male students are lagging behind every other group, including their black sisters, writes Richard Whitmire in his farewell USA Today column. President Barack Obama will be a symbol of success, but will that be enough to help black boys succeed?

One of the commenters, a teacher in a gritty school, has this to say:


I have heard *#gger spoken between my black students for years and no amount of telling them to stop has stoppped it. Then Obama won.

The next day after the election I walked down the hall on the way to class and a group of black students were talking with each other. One kid says, “Did you see that *#gger the other night when…” when another black student in the group says, “Yo man, we can’t call each other that anymore!” i nearly jumped in thee air.

The rate of *#gger between students has dropped off at my school to the point that I haven’t heard it in the hallway for a long time now. I hope that this transfers to academics as well.

Obama could be the best thing to happen to these kids in a long time. Keeping my fingers crossed.

And there it is. All of that crap about how it's wrong for white people to use the n-word but not black people, or how among black people it's really a term of endearment, is demonstrably garbage. Regardless of who uses it, the word is a disrespectful put-down, implying that the person on the receiving end is a hopeless second-class loser. The fact that it is in such widespread use among certain portions of the black population is telling, I think, as is the fact that black folks who have it together dislike the word, don't use it, and don't want to hear it. Who worries about being disrespected, except for people who so profoundly lack self-respect that they have to make up the deficit with respect they get from others? See here and here for instance. And why would they lack self-respect? Because they belong to a group for which they lack respect. How toxic that is, and how ironic that black people who live "respectable" lives are accused of not keeping it real, i.e., not being authentically black. Maybe now things will turn around.

Chicagoboyz has a post up: Blinded By His Narrow Focus. It's about an article the blog author read, that seems to extrapolate conditions in a county in California to the rest of the country.

I started to comment on it and then realized that my comments were running too long, so I decided to park them here.

I lived in Memphis, TN from 1982 until last year. When my daughter was in first grade - that would have been in 1993 or so - there weren't very many Hispanics in Memphis. Her class studied Mexico during multicultural week. One of my coworkers, a Mexican-American, was kind enough to speak to her class and answer questions about Mexico because no one in the school had any direct experience. By the time she finished elementary school, there were a few Hispanic children in some of the classes. Not long after, a third to a half of the school was Hispanic. (This was a parochial school.) Memphis experienced a big demographic shift, during which we saw some things we were not used to seeing, including Hispanic-looking people standing around outside Home Depot. (I never inquired as to their immigration status.) Billboards, flyers, newspapers in Spanish appeared and then increased in number too. No one planned this or decided it should happen, it just happened

My point(s)?
1 - Nothing, NOTHING is static. It never was. Memphis was never frozen in time. The Hispanic demographic shift was visible because of the Spanish-language stuff, and the schools suddenly had to add a lot of ESL classes, sure. But busing for desegregation happened, white flight happened, etc., long before this. Also waves of immigrants from countries where they were fleeing oppression, so that certain parts of town began to see Vietnamese restaurants and grocery stores, and various things of that nature. You can't really pick a moment in the past and say "this is the real Memphis". The only constant is change, right? Xenophobes and other people who can't handle change are going to have heartburn but they can't stop the process.

2 - Nothing stays put, either. Today Marin County, CA, tomorrow Podunk, OH. I should say "nothing people-related". El Ninos aren't going to suddenly start causing drought in Texas and flooding in California. But there's not a wall up between California and Ohio so even though the article might not speak to conditions today, the blog post author might re-read it two or three years from now in a different light.

But I keep thinking about cells. Cells have membranes, not walls, so that things can move in and out of the cells as needed for the cells to survive. [Edited to add: some non-animal cells have walls, of course.] The movement in and out is strictly controlled. If a cell membrane is destroyed, the cell no longer has integrity and it can't function any longer. I think eventually the world will be like one big cell. This process started happening with pre-Roman Empire trade routes and really started accelerating with steam ships and railroads and trans-continental air travel, and the internet by which we can read newspapers in other countries and have conversation with their inhabitants; and NAFTA and free trade and all that other stuff. But we're not there yet, and I wonder what kind of cell membrane the USA really needs. Maybe I'm a xenophobe but I wonder if we've let our membrane weaken prematurely.*

When I think about all the illegal immigrants who come here to find work, and why it is that they can find it (because employers can sidestep OSHA regs and labor laws if they know their employees won't complain) I wonder about capitalism. I wonder if it's true, as Marx(?) said, that capitalism requires an underclass. First the US had slaves, then black people without civil rights, then when black people got the same rights that white people had, suddenly we needed a new class of people without rights. Is that it? Or is it not necessary except for those capitalists who want too much profit and are willing to break the law to get it? I bet Fred Smith and people of his ilk aren't hiring illegals, and they're not hurting. I've had to show proof of eligibility to work at every job that I remember filling out paperwork for.

Still, it seems that we must somehow want these people here, and in the status they have. If we truly didn't want them, we'd send them out and close our borders, right? Instead of discussing whether, for instance, they should get driver licenses and pay in-state tuition. But since they are here, why is it so hard for those who are self-supporting and law-abiding (as far as they can be) to be regularized? Is it just the usual lumbering monster of bureaucracy, or an inherent flaw in our political system? I wish I knew.

*To continue the membrane analogy - one could look at immigration or at occupation, as a kind of endosymbiosis. The idea of endosymbiosis is that some of the organelles in eukaryotic cells - mitochondria, chloroplasts in plant cells - started out as prokaryotes that moved into other cells either as parasites or as food, and because the larger cell offered some protection and the smaller cell offered energy, it stayed around and reproduced with the larger cell. There's some evidence to support this (mitochondria have their own ribosomes, which are like bacterial ribosomes, and they have their own DNA, which is configured like bacterial DNA, not the X and Y of eukaryotes' nuclear DNA). These things have evolved so that you can't independently culture the mitochondria or the chloroplasts; they can only function as part of the eukaryotic cell. The point is that it doesn't matter now whether the prokaryotes that gave rise to these organelles started out as food or as parasites; they are a vital part of the eukaryotes either way. In the same way, it hopefully doesn't matter whether an American's ancestors came here for a better life, or fleeing famine or oppression, or were brought here in chains - they should be able to both contribute to the "cell" and enjoy the "cell's" benefits, and see themselves and be seen as part of the larger whole. This is hopefully true of our Hispanic immigrants as well. They change us, we change them, and we all benefit.

Adapt or die, right?

I read of black people who are confused as to what to think about J. Wright. They are confused because their own pastors say some of the things Wright says.

The church I attended in Memphis, while predominantly white, has black members, deacons, and elders. But time was, in conscious memory of some of the older members, that black people would not have been allowed to attend at all; they would have been turned away at the door. I daresay that if the black folks who now say that their pastors have said "some of" what Wright has said could have attended those services, they would have heard some familiar things from the preacher there too. It's not impossible that a church, and a pastor, can get the major things about Christianity right, and still be profoundly wrong about some pretty important stuff. Of course, one might say that racism and race relations are the most important things there are. If that's the case, then we aren't dealing with a church anymore.

Wright says that white people aren't comfortable with the styles of black churches; they are loud, the members move around. Surely he is not so stupid as to think that style is what we might find objectionable. "God damn America" is not style, it is substance, and inexcusable substance at that. His recent assertion that criticism of him is actually criticism of "the black church" is arrogance in the extreme. And his complaints about being "crucified" (while looking like he is mightily enjoying the attention) are actually blasphemous. Does he think he's Jesus?

Here is what I think is happening to Obama. I've seen it happen to some white folks a generation or two back. They spend a lot of time, a LOT of time, associating with people like them and they fall into a habit of thinking and speaking a certain way. Maybe they don't mean any harm, but they never stop and really think if they're being racist, or if they're being fair, or how others outside the group would think of what they're saying and doing. At some point they get caught out, and they are extremely embarrassed, mortified if they have the character to be, and they have to apologize and hopefully straighten up. I think Obama meant all that stuff he said about wanting to be a unifier and I think he truly never really thought about how that was not compatible with lending his supporting presence and money to a church that preached that hateful stuff. I bet he gets it now.

And I hope we get to the point that more black people in America can feel comfortable openly disagreeing with racist claptrap when it comes from people like Wright. Maybe, in the end, that will happen and it will end up being a positive thing for America.

Here is an article inviting Memphians to remember where they were and what happened 40 years ago when MLK was assassinated. There are more than 90 comments. It's fascinating to read how people's observations agree and disagree.

I have two rules about discussing racial matters. One is that no one is allowed to read someone else's mind, i.e., assume wrong attitudes and opinions in people he or she doesn't like. The other is that no one is allowed to tell anyone that he didn't see what he saw, hear what he heard, experience what he experienced, etc. Usually the second rule applies to white people who try to tell black people that they are imagining the effects of racism and discrimination - NOT that they are imagining other people's attitudes, because they very well may be, but actual experiences that they have had. But both of those rules cut both ways, really. So in this comment thread you see people saying "I saw X" and other people saying "I doubt X really happened". Did X happen or not? I wonder if it's possible to know, now.

The stories of police brutality are upsetting. I offer this story from Saturday about a black woman and a white policeman as a very uplifting antidote. Some people say nothing has changed in 40 years. Not true.

Here is an article about Professor Donald Hindley of Brandeis, who is being punished for something he said in the classroom: Shhh! Free speech crackdown on campus.

Brandeis University, named after Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (a famous champion of free speech), just insisted on sensitivity training and threatened to fire a professor after one student - maybe two or three - complained about the professor’s speech. In a Latin American politics class, professor Donald Hindley, 74, who’s taught at Brandeis for nearly 50 years, used a word he’s used many times - “wetback” - to explain the nastiness aimed at Mexican immigrants who entered the United States over the Rio Grande.

The student(s) complained. Anonymously.

The administration launched an investigation into his “discriminatory” remarks, never telling Hindley what those remarks were. In one statement provost Mary Kraus praised the “courage” of the anonymous student(s) “to speak up against discrimination.” She also said three students suffered “significant emotional trauma” as a result of hearing the remarks.

FIRE took up his case, which may be why he wasn't terminated outright.

But here's a bit more about what he actually said:

At least one complaint appears to have stemmed from Hindley's reference to the term "wetbacks," a derogatory expression used to describe illegal immigrants who have crossed the Mexican border. Hindley defended his discussion of the term, saying he had used it to describe racism of a certain historical period."Throughout American history, he said, 'When Mexicans come north as illegal immigrants, we call them wetbacks.'"

Prof penalized for alleged racist remarks

Now, I don't think any reasonable person would think that HE was calling illegal immigrants "wetbacks" in that sentence. But may I point out two things: In his scolding disapproval of American racism he did say "we", which means he is taking on corporate guilt in the use of that term; and he played into the victimization politics that is the source of complaints like the one made against him. So perhaps it's not surprising that those complaints were made.

I remember that when I was a little girl I heard the word "wetback" and I asked my dad about it. He responded that it's a rude term used about Mexicans, assuming that they came into the country illegally by swimming the Rio Grande. I learned (a) who the word is used to refer to, (b) the etymology of it, and (c) not to use it. Had Prof. Hindley responded to questions about the term in this straightforward and objective manner, I doubt anybody would have batted an eyelash.

Monnie has a post about Bill Cosby's new book. The statistics about black people and violence bother her, as they do every right-thinking person.

When I was still in Memphis, my last job was in a very bad part of town. (Actually, the one before that had razor wire around the parking lot, and the one before that ... well, anyway.) The lab was down in the plant, with the parking lot a short distance away. If I left work at or after sundown and any of the operators saw me come out of the building, he would drop what he was doing to walk me to my car. All of the plant operators were black. Once another operator was just coming into the plant when we got to the parking lot, and he said, "How come you don't ever walk me to my truck?" "Cause ain't nothing gonna get you!" my escort replied, laughing. But that reminded me that statistically, those guys were at greater risk than I was. I started telling them when I thanked them that I appreciated their care and concern, and that they actually needed to employ the buddy system among themselves after hours. They didn't take me seriously, though. I think those statistics aren't generally known and understood.

One of the things that bothered the crap out of me, when I was in Memphis, was the amount of focus and effort and attention on things like sports arenas and fancy boat docks, and how much money the city needed to spend on those things (money we didn't have; besides there were always, always cost overruns and the inevitable discovery of somebody's hand in the cookie jar later on.) I wanted so badly to run across Mayor Herenton out on the sidewalk somewhere and to grab some random black kid - preferably a teenage boy with the khaki pants dragged down so that the crotch was between his knees and he had to duck-walk, you know how that is - and say "Look at this, Mayor Herenton - THIS is Memphis! This is the future of Memphis! Not the FedEx Forum, not Beale Street Landing - but this kid right here! How are we investing in this kid?" And to turn to the kid and ask him in what way the City of Memphis expresses to him that it cares whether he lives or dies. The park program is underfunded - public swimming pools not kept up - summer jobs programs cut - no community centers - nothing that is not privately funded or run by the churches. But by golly, we will have plenty of public funding for entertaining rich folks.

So the kids are neglected and have nothing to do, they see all the attention given to things that are and will forever be out of their reach, then we wonder why they feel disaffected and why they drop out of school and why the crime rate is so high. And it beats heck out of me why the politicians with those entertain-the-rich-folks attitudes and the hand in the cookie jar have so much popular support.

I have an informal list of things I won't miss about Memphis. Wendi Thomas is muscling her way onto it with her dang column today, which I won't even link to, in which she bemoans the SC decision to end the assignment of kids to school by race. Even though she admits that in Memphis, where white kids make up 9% of the student population and many schools have fewer than 3 white students or no white students at all, it can't make any difference. Even though she admits that when Bush was elected she predicted that she'd be picking cotton on a plantation by the time he's out of office and now realizes that won't happen - does she realize how extremely offensive that is to those of us who voted for Bush? Does she realize what she's calling us?

From the article: "But there's got to be some mixing for the black student not to buy into the stereotypes he'll hear about white kids, and vice versa. Especially vice versa."

Why "especially", Wendi? Why?

I am SO READY to be out of here.

It seems that Lemoyne-Owen, the historically-black college here in Memphis, will get 3 million dollars from the city over the next 3 years.

I'm cool with that, really.

What I'm not cool with is this from Councilman Rickey Peete:

"I hope that my colleagues will look beyond race and petty politics and vote for this resolution," he said.

If his colleagues were truly "looking beyond race" then a HBCU would be no different from any other school. That's not what he meant. He meant, stop being the racist and the petty politician you are every single day, for a few seconds, so you can vote for this resolution. I swear, some of the verbiage that I read about the white council people having to take would give me a stroke. Like Edmund Ford saying "sometimes you just have to bring out the sheet." I would have gotten up and walked out. Don't know how they do it.

OK, in the Mickey Wright case, the DA has drawn us a picture, and I have to say I'm not impressed.

It seems that Mardis had told county employees that they were not to send a black code enforcer to his place of business. The DA's office thought they had a hate crime. Then at the last minute couple of black people showed up and said they and Mardis were friends; so, no hate crime. The case wasn't so juicy now, I guess, so they lost interest and let him plead no contest to 2nd degree murder.

OK, we need to drop this nonsense that because a person has black friends, or white friends, or whatever, then that proves he is not a racist. I've known terrible racists who made an exception for So-and-so. Then again, whether a person is a racist or not isn't anybody else's business unless he acts on it. It's the acting that's the problem.

That's where I think the whole hate-crime thing is counterproductive. This case should have been approached like the earlier case I mentioned, with the black teenagers who killed the white woman: they were murderous thugs. Period. So is Mardis. Lock him up forever. What's so hard about that?

Thaddeus Matthews has more to say about this issue, including some very disturbing information about the judge. I vaguely remember that but didn't realize that he was still on the bench, and that he was the judge in this case. It's at times like this that I suspect I need to be on blood pressure medication.

This sucks. More here but you may have to register (it's free).

Back in 2001, a Shelby County code enforcer named Mickey Wright disappeared.

As I recall, he had phoned his wife to make a lunch date and then never showed up. She reported him missing sometime that afternoon, and a search was begun right away. Mr. Wright was an insulin-dependent diabetic, and that was an extra concern, of course. Days and weeks went by. Posters were put up. His family begged and pleaded for anyone who knew anything to come forward.

Eventually his burned-out truck was found (IIRC) and it was determined that he had been killed but his killer was not caught. Last year, I think, a new-broom sheriff's deputy reopened that case and kept on it until he found the killer: Dale Mardis, who owned some kind of business that Mr. Wright was in the act of applying county code to. From the article:

Mardis, 53, who was sentenced for second-degree murder, was required to tell prosecutors what he did with Wright’s body.

He said in a statement that Wright’s body was mostly burned and that any portions remaining were put into junked automobiles that were eventually crushed.

So he killed the man, which, because he was enforcing the law, was just as much a blow to law-and-order as killing a policeman is; did that to his body; and let his family suffer a very long time not knowing where he was or what had happened or was happening to him. He looked at those posters every day and never said a word. And he was allowed to plead no contest and sentenced to 15 years.

The family apparently acted out in the courtroom and I don't blame them.

I don't understand. I really don't. I would love to say this is not a race issue but it's really hard to explain otherwise, although in a city that's 2/3 black you'd think this kind of crap wouldn't be happening anymore. Because a few years ago when a white woman was carjacked at a Sonic in Collierville and driven away somewhere and killed, her black teenage killers got life without parole. That sentence was appropriate for them and it would have been even more so in this case. I Do Not Understand. I hope somebody with the DA's office draws us a picture.

Briton32 sez:

"I think that there are just as many racist black people as there are white."

People who know me tend to confide in me, oddly enough, and ask me to help them understand stuff. Years ago I worked with a black woman named Tonya. She came in to work one day hopping mad, I knew because I could hear the tone of her voice as she complained to our coworkers, and eventually she came into my office and told me her story.

Tonya had gone to see a new doctor - a cardiologist, maybe - and the minute she walked in the door the receptionist snapped, "We don't take TennCare."

"I don't have TennCare," Tonya said, "I have insurance on my job." (By the way, other black coworkers have told the same story at different times.)

So in my office, Tonya asked, "Why did she say that to me?"

In answer, I told Tonya that while I do not see racists behind every tree, and while I think in general people are better off giving other people the benefit of the doubt, in this case it seemed pretty clear that the receptionist saw a black woman walk into the waiting room and thought "welfare queen". Racism, Tonya. Sorry you had to experience that.

"But the receptionist was black!" Tonya objected.

Okay, I know there is a school of thought that black people cannot be racists. I do not subscribe to it. I think there are no vices and no virtues that white people are capable of, that black people are not also capable of. (The CF and I talked about this concept last weekend, in terms of men and women.) To say otherwise is to reduce black people to the level of children or animals.

I've been struggling to find a definition of racism that works for me. What I've come up with so far can also apply to sexism, ageism, etc.

1 - A group of people is identified. This can be an arbitrary group, like "old folks", or a well-defined group, like "people over 65". So far we are OK.
2 - Attributes are assigned to the group. Now we are not OK, because -
3 - These attributes are now assumed to apply to members of the group without checking to see if they are appropriate or not.

And the attributes do not have to be negative. It is not negative, for instance, to have a sense of rhythm. Tell a black person that you are not surprised he is a good dancer b/c black people have rhythm, and see where that gets you. No one likes to be pigeonholed.

You can also be that way about a group of which you are a member; either because you think you are an exception, or because you label yourself too.

The reason I'm not happy with this definition is this: my FIL had a few dizzy spells a while back, and I recommended that he check with his doctor about his blood pressure medication. Because I've seen some "old folks" actually pass out due to the fact that as they aged, the medication became too much. Sure enough, when he complained to the doctor about his dizzyness, the doctor cut back his BP meds. We know that people start needing a little help with close-up vision starting at around age 40. That's not "ageist" is it? Is it racist to say that black women need to care for their hair differently than white women do?

Having trouble coming up with something that encompasses benign racism like the rhythm thing, but also allows for common sense.

I've been considering writing about the sermon I heard last Sunday. LaShawn Barber has an interesting post entitled "Has 'White Guilt' Run Its Course?" (no) and it and some of the comments have inspired me to go on and do it.

The sermon was given by one of the associate ministers, who happens to be the son of our senior minister. The title was "Why Diversity Matters" (and let me say parenthetically that I long for sermon titles like "Behaving Like a God-Fearing Person" and I may do something about that before long.) He started out by saying that Memphis is a segregated city and we need to stop being that way. Okay, well, from what I read Memphis is actually more integrated than most cities, but I made a conscious decision to keep an open mind and listen to what he had to say.

What he had to say was a resume of his own experiences. All of his schooling, K-12, was at private schools here that are mostly white, so he was surrounded, as he said, with "people like him". College, ditto. He never was around black people much, apparently, until he went to seminary in New Jersey and got a job at a church where, for the first time in his life, he was a racial minority. Apparently he got some kind of epiphany and has come back to get us all straightened out. Okay, maybe it's ugly of me to put it that way. I have PMS. Shoot me.

Here's the deal: My daughter went to a parochial school K-6. The school was about 50/50 black and white. I remember one year they had an overabundance of boys in her grade for some reason, and there were 4 black and 3 white girls in her class. Public magnet schools for 7-12, and these teetered on the 50/50 mark the whole time; by the time she graduated from high school, white kids were a slight minority at that school. Our neighborhood is probably roughly 50/50. A white family moves out and a black family moves in. A black family moves out and a white family moves in. F played with the black kid next door - they set up a space ship in the back yard, I remember. As for me, the overwhelming majority of the last 24 or so years I have worked at places where white people were in the minority.

And then there's F's friend, also a member of that church, who went to Central High School here in Memphis, and was part of the 13% of the student population that was white.

We don't need anybody lecturing us about how segregated we are, especially someone with the - I don't want to say "privileged" because, even though it was more expensive, it wasn't necessarily any better than my daughter's. But "elitist"? Is that what I mean? background that he stood up there and told us he had. I think he was projecting his experiences onto the rest of us white folks without stopping to ask himself whether his assumptions were valid. That's partly a sign of immaturity, but also there's this:

One of the commenters on LaShawn's post said that she thought liberal guilt was a sign of laziness. "It is so much less effort to make a big display of self-flagellation, and throw some money (other people’s money) around than to really engage with people. It is so much less effort than to follow Christ, in whom there is no Jew or Greek, no black or white, no free of slave." Is it laziness that this minister hasn't gotten to know the portion of the congregation that isn't "like him"? People who can't afford expensive clothes and ski trips and attend or send their kids to public schools? And ironically, now I am going to talk about the virtue of diversity: If you spend time at work or at school with people who are not "like you" then it becomes easier to leave your comfort zone and connect with those people; or maybe your comfort zone just becomes a lot larger.

It seems our new Congressman Steve Cohen is in the news, at least in this internet publication.

I think Congressman Cohen tries really, really hard to assume other people's good will. Sometimes it backfires on him, as when he lost the primary to Ford Jr. 10 years ago and made some angry statements afterward about how he'd thought we had all gotten past the race nonsense. (I thought, don't know why you thought that, no one else does.) To clarify - in this primary, Cohen came with years of experience serving the same consituents in the State Senate, and Harold Ford Jr. came straight out of lawschool. Cohen thought his years of service would stand up against his opponent being black, and a Ford, and he said as much; then he got his head handed to him.

But seriously, if we ever do get past all the race nonsense it will be because of people like him who try very hard to just forge straight ahead as though racism and racists don't exist. I support him in that, although me being a conservative Republican, and him a liberal Democrat, he probably will never get my vote. : )

Interesting election. I didn't really have a chance to post about it until now.

1 - Harold Jr. is out of a job. It's rumored that he will run for mayor of Memphis. I think that's kind of a comedown from US Congressman, but actually I wish he would. I'd vote for him.

2 - Ophelia Ford won her election to the Tennessee State Senate by a very wide margin. It irritates me that newspaper articles referring to the fact that that the Senate voided the tainted election she "won" before, and refused to seat her, invariably remark that there was no indication that she had anything to do with the fraud. Of course she (probably) didn't. That wasn't the point. The point was that it was an improperly run election and they were right to void it, and therefore the seat wasn't hers any more than it was any Joe Blow or Jane Doe Memphian's. But it's hers now. We'll see how she does.

3 - And Steve Cohen did beat both Jake Ford and Republican Mark White to win Jr's vacated 9th district Congressional seat, despite being white, and a Jew, and not a Ford. Even though I would have preferred seeing the Republican win, I'm still glad for Sen. Cohen, and what this says about the willingness (let's be blunt) of black Memphians to vote for a white man. But he needs to get in there and PERFORM for the next two years, because he has to win the Dem. primary again if he's to keep that spot.

Ah, the race card.

The RNC made an ad about Harold Ford Jr. with a woman who claims to have met him at a Playboy party and who says, "Harold, call me!"

Apparently the ad is racist, according to the NAACP, because it's a white woman.

For God's sake.

Do they not see interracial couples every single day? Maybe they need to get out more.

Saturday I scoped out the site of my j. i. With no traffic, it's about a 20-minute drive from my house, so I figure I'll double that Wednesday morning and that ought to be OK. My references are just about ready and my suit still fits.

Took F back to school Sunday.

And on the way back home, R and I stopped at a fast-food place that caters to people on the highway, to take a break from driving and have a snack. I saw a little vignette that made little sense to me at the time, but when I thought about it this morning it kind of fell into place.

The people waiting for their food when we got there were all white folks. One man had a t-shirt with a picture on it, a skull and maybe a fist or something, that for some reason made me think of white supremacists. That coupled with the way they were looking at and talking to the black teenagers behind the counter raised the hair on my neck. It wasn't anything overt really, just a gut feeling I had. And I grew up in Mississippi, so I don't see racists behind every tree. When R and I sat down, I told him that I hoped those kids didn't see what I saw. "They're innocent children," he said.

But this morning for some reason I replayed a bit of the scene before we placed our order. One of the teenagers, a pretty girl with a charming smile, handed the t-shirt guy his order and said, "Here's your specially-made salad." He said suspiciously, "I just ordered a salad from the menu - nothing special." "Oh, we had to make yours special because we didn't have any made up ahead," she said, and she turned her back. He stood there a moment with the bag in his hand before he walked away.

When I remembered that this morning I laughed my head off. Maybe I don't have to feel bad about her having to deal with those people after all.

Interesting election we had yesterday.

Harold Ford, Sr. was elected and re-elected to Congress from the 9th district for many years. If memory serves, 1994 was his last election, the one in which the Republicans achieved a majority, and in his distress over losing chairmanship of the Ways and Means committee, he made his famous statement about East Memphis "devils" who voted for his opponent. But he passed the baton to his son, Harold Jr., who appears to have better self-control and has had lots of favorable attention, and who has held that seat ever since. Now Jr. has set his sights on the senate seat that Frist is vacating, so that left the 9th district seat open.

One of the contenders for the Democratic nomination in 1994 was Steve Cohen, a state senator who lives in Midtown. As I recall, Cohen expressed some hope that Republicans would cross party lines to vote for him in the primary. Since he certainly isn't any less liberal or less of a Democrat than Jr., the only reason a Republican would have to do that would be because Cohen is white. To his dismay, we white Republicans didn't turn out to have the racial solidarity he hoped we would have, and he was soundly defeated.

But Cohen has come out on top in this primary, to the distress of many local black politicians. There were lots of people running in the Democratic primary. The second-up, Nikki Tinker, came really close to beating him. Walter Bailey, county commissioner, wished that some of those also-rans would clear the field so that a black person would win the primary. Because white people can't understand the "unique" needs of the 9th district: unemployment, for instance. Here is Bailey's letter to the Commercial Appeal. Because you have to register (it's free) I'll copy a bit.

The challenges that confront African-Americans in the predominantly urban Ninth District are unique. They include unemployment, poverty, crime, income disparity, lack of educational opportunities and the realities of racial discrimination. These challenges demand a congressional voice that would be more inclined, by virtue of the personal experience of being black, to have the necessary commitment, passion, knowledge base and undivided loyalty.

(Yes, we have a certain amount of crime in the 9th district. Just last week somebody broke into our 6-ft privacy fence and stole our lawn mower. I don't know how many mowers we have had over the years. We've never had the opportunity to wear one out before it's liberated.)

Lack of educational opportunities? Every child has access to a free education in the public schools. Moreover, besides University of Memphis, Christian Brothers University, LeMoyne-Owen, and Rhodes College, Southwest Tennessee Community College is right there, as well as various trade and technical schools. I don't know what more he wants.

And I have to wonder about the "undivided loyalty" thing. Is this a dig at Sen. Cohen being a Jew? Surely not.

Well, anyway, so Steve Cohen won the primary. Congratulations, Sen. Cohen. But he'll face the Republican primary winner in the general election, who ordinarily I'd say doesn't have a snowball's chance, except that Jake Ford (how many Fords are there? don't ask) will be running as an independent. For those who who think that seat belongs to a black person and/or a Ford, he will be a strong candidate. It will be quite interesting to see how this one turns out.

Oh, and I like the new voting machines.