Archive for the 'Race, racism and related issues' Category

Confidential NOM strategy memo: “Provoke the gay marriage base… fan the hostility.”

Tuesday, March 27th, 2012 by Barry Deutsch

[Crossposted at Family Scholars Blog.]

From the Associated Press:

The leading national organization opposing same-sex marriage has sought to split the Democratic Party base by pitting African-Americans and Hispanics against gay-rights groups, according to confidential strategy memos made public by court officials in Maine. [...]

The documents, dating from 2009, were written by the National Organization for Marriage and had been kept from the public until Monday, when they were unsealed by court officials in Maine.

The Human Rights Campaign has posted the released NOM documents. One passage from NOM’s strategy document:

The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks—two key Democratic constituencies. Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage; develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots. No politician wants to take up and push an issue that splits the base of the party. Fanning the hostility raised in the wake of Prop 8 is key to raising the costs of pushing gay marriage to its advocates and persuading the movement’s allies that advocates are unacceptably overreaching on this issue.

NOM’s representatives often talk about the value of civil discourse, and in particular complain about the use of the word “bigot” and the hostility of Proposition 8 opponents.

In light of these documents, I think we have to seriously doubt NOM’s sincerity. In fact, it’s impossible to believe that NOM has ever for a moment desired civil disagreement. NOM deliberately provokes lgbt people into anger, in order to denounce those who they succeed in provoking. I cannot imagine a clearer example of hypocrisy.

If you genuinely want civil disagreement, then you don’t deliberately “[fan] the hostility” in your opponents. If you genuinely want pro-SSM folks to stop using the word “bigot,” then you don’t “provoke the gay marriage base into” calling others “bigots.”

Maggie, if you’re reading, could you please address this? How could you call for civil disagreement, while secretly plotting to fan hostility? Am I mistaken to see that as cynical and hypocritical?

* * *

Although there’s nothing wrong with NOM seeking Black allies and supporters, there’s something ugly about the way NOM wants to “drive a wedge between gays and blacks.”

I’ve complained in the past that marriage equality opponents consider lgbt people instrumentally, rather than as people. Thus, opponents of marriage equality say that they oppose SSM in order to “send a message” about mothers and fathers, or to incrementally support a “marriage culture,” but they very rarely have concern for the well-being of the lgbt people whose families are being treated as post-it notes.

NOM’s attitude towards African-Americans seems similar. Black people are desired as fronts, not as partners. For example, despite the centrality of African-Americans to their strategy, NOM’s strategy doesn’t include recruiting Black people to decision-making positions within NOM. (Check out the faces here and here, to see what I mean.) Why not?

Did NOM ask, is a bunch of white folks provoking a fight between lgbt people (some of who are Black) and the Black community (some of whom are gay) really what’s best for the Black community? Did they worry about their “wedge” being “driven” right through the families of Black lgbt people? It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them.

* * *

Speaking of trying to drive a wedge into families, the strategy document also proposed paying $50,000 for a staff member to work full-time trying to “identify children of gay parents willing to speak on camera” on NOM’s behalf. Politics doesn’t get any uglier than that.

As Miranda at Right Wing Watch points out, if NOM really did this, “it seems that a year’s worth of full-time work didn’t turn up a single child of gay parents who was willing to be portrayed as a ‘victim’ of marriage equality.”

* * *

If you want to follow this issue in more detail, the blog “Good As You” has been all over it. NOM’s response has so far been limited to a single “some of our best friends are non-white” post.

Posted in Ampersand, Homophobic zaniness/more LGBTQ issues, Race, racism and related issues, Same-Sex Marriage | Comment

Alfre Woodard reads Sojourner Truth

Saturday, March 24th, 2012 by Barry Deutsch

This is just a stunningly great reading:

TRANSCRIPT

MODERATOR: Here, the black abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who was freed from slavery in 1827, speaks to a gathering of feminists, in Akron, Ohio, in 1851.

ALFRE WOODARD AS SOJOURNER TRUTH: Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the Negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helped me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or give me the best place. And ain’t I a woman?

Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, I can work as much — no man, no man could head I’ve gathered into barns. And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?

I have borne thirteen children, and seen most of ‘em sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing – what’s that thing in the head. What they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] Intellect! That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with a woman’s rights or negroes’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?

Then that man there, right there that little man in black there, he says women can’t have rights as much as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman. Where did your Christ come from? Where, where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man ain’t had nothing to do with it.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, right side up again! And now they is asking to do it. The men better let ‘em!

Ed Darrell writes:

This is a piece one does best to absorb from oral performance. It is a piece that one should hear repeatedly, to understand.

Woodard nails this one well, I think.

Ms. Truth’s speech needs careful reflection. She was not just speaking for women’s rights, but was lecturing the suffragists as well on their having overlooked the plight of women of color and working women, and women in poverty. She’s talking to you, and to me, and asking us to confront our stereotypes of what women are and what women do, to recognize that women are humans, deserving of full respect for that reason alone.

Posted in Ampersand, Feminism, sexism, etc, Race, racism and related issues | Comment

Cartoon: The Modern Sisyphus

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011 by Barry Deutsch

Script for this comic SelectShow

Posted in Ampersand, Cartooning & comics, crossposted on TADA, Feminism, sexism, etc, Race, racism and related issues | Comment

Study: Lighter-Skinned Black Women Get Lighter Prison Sentences

Thursday, September 15th, 2011 by Barry Deutsch

From the blog “Layers of Blackness“:

‘The Impact of Light Skin on Prison Time for Black Female Offenders’ is the first of its kind to examine the relationship between skin tone and sentencing among African American women. It looked at 12,158 women imprisoned in the southern state of North Carolina between 1995 and 2009.

In several US states including Mississippi, Montana and South Carolina it is common practice for correctional officers to assess the skin tone of prisoners when they are being admitted to jail. The process is fairly crude with simple notations like ‘dark skin’ ‘medium skin’ ‘light skin’ being recorded. This is supposed to enable escapees to be more easily identified.

The author’s findings revealed that on average, black female inmates with lighter complexions received 12 per cent less jail time than their darker skinned counterparts. Having light skin reduced the amount time served in prison by 11 per cent. The study is consistent with the findings of similar studies on skin tone and sentencing of black men.

“According to The Minority Brief, the study authors controlled factors including prior record, conviction date and weight; they also considered if the woman in question was serving time for robbery or homicide, which tend to carry long sentences.”

Posted in Ampersand, crossposted on TADA, Prisons and Justice, Race, racism and related issues | Comment

Movies should show that good people can still be bigots

Monday, August 29th, 2011 by Barry Deutsch

Patricia Turner considers the depictions of white characters in The Help:

With one possible exception, the white women are remarkably unlikable, and not just because of their racism. Like the housewives portrayed in reality television shows, the housewives of Jackson treat each other, their parents and their husbands with total callousness. In short, they are bad people, therefore they are racists.

There’s a problem, though, with that message. To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not.

Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud. It’s the fallacy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.

But that wasn’t the case. The White Citizens Councils, the thinking man’s Ku Klux Klan, were made up of white middle-class people, people whose company you would enjoy. An analogue can be seen in the way popular culture treats Germans up to and during World War II. Good people were never anti-Semites; only detestable people participated in Hitler’s cause.

Cultures function and persist by consensus. In Jackson and other bastions of the Jim Crow South, the pervasive notion, among poor whites and rich, that blacks were unworthy of full citizenship was as unquestioned as the sanctity of church on Sunday.

Most of us are not moral islands, independently thinking though every moral belief based on first principles; for the most part, we rely on our peer groups’ standards to let us know what is and isn’t moral. A passionate ACLU liberal living in Amherst, Massachusetts, might instead be a passionate pro-life tea partier if they had been raised in the more conservative areas of Texas. That same person, raised instead in 1920s Germany, might think it only reasonable and moral to be a Nazi.

Of course, in every community there are also some moral rebels — and in hindsight, in some cases, those moral rebels are heroes.

I’m not saying that all moral codes are equally good. I am saying that these questions are not a matter of good character vs bad character, and when media presents an issue like racism as bad people versus good people — ignoring how bad community values can shape even good people’s beliefs — that is unhelpful.

(Hat tip.)

Posted in Ampersand, crossposted on TADA, Race, racism and related issues | Comment

A Messed-Up Libertarianism

Sunday, May 1st, 2011 by Barry Deutsch

A quote from libertarian Jim Henley, via LOOG:

Most libertarians would agree that it’s a messed-up state that:

* Creates a massive crime problem in poor minority neighborhoods with a futile, vicious and every more far-reaching attempt to prevent commerce in popular, highly portable intoxicants that leaves absurd numbers of young men with felony records, making them marginally employable.

* Fails to provide adequate policing for such neighborhoods.

* Fails to provide effective education in such neighborhoods after installing itself as the educator of first resort.

* Uses regulatory power to sharply curtail entry into lines of business from hair-care to ride provision, further limiting the employment options of people in such neighborhoods.

* Has in the past actively fostered the oppression of said minority, up to and including spending state money and time in keeping its members in bondage.

* To make up for all of the above, provides a nominal amount of tax-financed welfare for the afflicted.

But it’s a messed-up libertarianism that looks at that situation and says, “Man, first thing we gotta do is get rid of that welfare!”

Posted in Ampersand, Class, poverty, labor, & related issues, Prisons and Justice, Race, racism and related issues | Comment

Quote: Make It More Ethnic

Monday, February 14th, 2011 by Barry Deutsch

I have been on sets before when a director says ‘can you make it more ethnic?’ I always say ‘can you demonstrate to me how you want it done?’ That usually ends it.

–Yvette Nicole Brown

Reading this article by Jabari Asim made me think about another pernicious aspect of the “sassy fat black women” stereotype, which is that almost any strong or angry character played by a fat black actress is going to come off as the stereotype, even when that’s unfair. Years before she starred in “Community,” Yvette Nicole Brown’s photo from a Dairy Queen commercial illustrated this New York Times article about the stereotype.

But the photo, from a Dairy Queen commercial about a guy who repeatedly drops his carry-on luggage1 on another passenger’s head, is a marginal case at best.

Brown’s job in this commercial is to be comically enraged. She uses wide eyes and an angry voice to do this. I don’t think a big white guy, given the same part, would have performed it differently. But when Brown did it, her photograph was published in the Times as an example of a troubling racial stereotype. That can’t be fun.

As Ani remarks in the comments of pre-Racialicious:

I would be pretty sassy and annoyed if a someone’s large carry on bag was repeatedly dropped on my head. I didn’t think her reaction was totally out of line for this type of situation. [...]

I am not saying terrible racial stereotypes don’t happen, but does context (ie carry-on being repeatedly dropped on head) ever trump that?

Obviously, the stereotypical casting of fat black women as “sassy” happens a lot, and should be criticized. But I also don’t want a situation where an actress like Brown automatically gets criticized if she ever plays strong or angry.

Anyhow, great quote, isn’t it?

  1. It took me a few moments before I got why Youtube’s suggested next video to watch was Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Posted in Ampersand, crossposted on TADA, Media criticism, Race, racism and related issues | Comment

Oscar Grant’s Life Is Worth Two Years

Monday, November 8th, 2010 by Barry Deutsch

Johannes Mehserle, the white transit cop who accidentally drew his gun rather than his taser (completely different weight and placement on his body), and then accidentally turned off his gun’s safety, and then accidentally shot Oscar Grant, a young black man who was unarmed and lying helpless on the ground, to death, was convicted of accidental manslaughter (the minimum possible charge) and given a sentence of two years minus 146 days already served (the minimum possible sentence).

As I interpret the law, it’s in effect legal for police to shoot black men to death at any time, for any reason, or for no reason, as long as no one records video of the shooting. However, if multiple people happen to record the shooting, and if the videos become public, then shooting black men becomes illegal and carries a two-year sentence.

David Schraub:

It’s not that one can’t construct a narrative legitimizing a range of different sentences; it’s that, given that discretion, courts consistently apply the harshest narratives in cases of white victims and black defendants, and the most lax ones in cases of white defendants and black victims. In this case, the could rationalize either a two year or a 14 year sentence — it elected to do the former. In the next ten cases — all with black defendants — the court probably could rationalize either a two year or a 14 year sentence, and will likely pick the latter. The fact that we might be able to justify each sentence individually doesn’t actually resolve the moral problem.

Posted in Ampersand, crossposted on TADA, Prisons and Justice, Race, racism and related issues | Comment