John Mark Reynolds has an extremely interesting post on politics vis a vis profanity. In it, he surmises:

To paraphrase Senator Edwards, there are two Americas. There is the America where calling your opponent a (insert profanity here) freak is normal and the Other Places where it is not. Vulgar America is a place where blasphemy, the real kind, is still considered “daring” and the only offense would be feeling offended by it. There are Other Places where using the Lord’s name in vain is still considered rude.

If you live mostly in one place, then the other seems weird to you. In the Other Places, a lady or gentleman might swear (though with apologies later) when very angry. The “frankly Scarlet” line of attack is tolerated, if not encouraged in extreme circumstances.

While Reynolds’ piece is primarily focused on the political ramifications of this cultural split, I’m more interested in the sociological implications. He notes,

Senator Obama is best understood as coming out of the blend of government and academic conferences and non-profits that often views itself as the best part of the nation. He “gets” that world . . . including the new rules of Vulgar America. As a result, the harsh words of Jeremiah Wright (”d- America”) do not sound so harsh to him and opposition to them must be all about race.

He repudiates some of the “ideas” of Reverend Wright, in good academic fashion with no clarity about which ideas he rejects. Even most Democrat primary voters don’t see how alienating these words are, because at least a big plurality of them live and work in Vulgar America.

Divorcing it from the explicitly political, I’d hafta say that I’m from Vulgar America. Not saying that I grew up with a bunch of people who cuss like sailors (I’ve heard that my mother cussed once, but I’ve never actually heard her cuss.), but the groups that he cites as being the constituents of Vulgar America have tended to be the circles I’ve traveled in my adult life. But then, I think there’s a degree to which he oversimplifies the differences in Vulgar America and Other America. Specifically, I think there are people in Other America who do (or would, if they heard the entire sermon) understand where Reverend Wright, for instance, is coming from, even if they disagree with it. In other words, I don’t know that the rhetorical devices of Vulgar America, for lack of a better term (pun intended), are as much of a disconnect as he supposes. While I am certain that there are people who shut off completely when they hear “vulgar” phrasing, my general impression is that cussing is not as off-putting as Reynolds would have us believe. But then, I probably wouldn’t know because I live in Vulgar America.

But thinking about it a little more, and perhaps from a dramatically different angle, I’m curious about how Black “Vulgar America” is. Now what I’m not suggesting is that all Black folks cuss regularly, or even abide cussing in their presence, because ultimately his point is not about the specific vocabulary of vulgarity. While Reynolds is careful to make academia the central locus of Vulgar America, thereby allowing it to influence pundits on both the left and right, the way he describes Other America …They will tolerate a dismissive McCain vulgarity in [terrorist fascism’s] direction, but they don’t want to hear their sacred things (God, duty, honor, country) dismissed that way. For some reason, that line fills me with a very specific image of what Other America looks like, and the picture I see looks a lot like the crowd at a tractor pull, a NASCAR event, or at Graceland. Now, this may not at all be Reynolds’ intent, but that’s kinda what I’m seeing. I see superimposed flags and crosses. I see people with a “love it or leave it” mentality, which is not where most of the Black folks I know come from, regardless of their political bent. See, most of the Black folks I’ve known in my life (which means the overwhelming majority of the people I’ve known in my life), Democratic, Republican, Independent, and other, have no problems understanding that loving America, or being proud of it, is not the same as uncritical acceptance of everything that goes on here. In fact, if I’m honest about it, the only Black folks I’ve ever “known” who have intimated otherwise are ones I “know” only via their writing. (And for real, I personally believe that the timbre of their arguments is amped up a bit to elicit reactions. My guess is that if I actually knew those people, the ideas I’d hear expressed would be quite a bit more nuanced.) And again, I’m not saying that the “God, honor, duty, country” set can’t include any Black people, but my guess is that if it does, there aren’t a whole, whole lot of us in there. Not if those are the main criteria.

To take it a little further afield, I think that the designation of “vulgar” is very much class-based. I mean, if you do the etymology, there’s no question that certain words got acceptance by “cultured” folk because those were the words the “cultured” folks used. I mean, for real - the word “vulgar” itself is rooted in the idea that “there’s a lower class and we ain’t it.” Now for much of American history, the “we ain’t it” class has been Us. Commensurate with that, many of our cultural products have been regarded as “vulgar” (at least at their inception), even when they reflected high artistry. (Hello, Jazz, et al) Hence, while I’m fairly sure that Reynolds’ by no means intended to automatically include Black folks in Vulgar America, I wonder if his description of Other America inadvertently excludes us.

But then at the same time, I’m also thinking that what he says about Other America, “they don’t want to hear their sacred things dismissed…” is true of any group, even Vulgar America. The only line of demarcation between the Other America he describes and another Other America is what constitutes the “scared things.” Cuz my guess is that for even people who cuss all the time, there are certain people/things/ideas/institutions for which certain words are always inappropriate. But that’s just me guessin’. I probably don’t know, because it’s pretty much a lock that I don’t live in Reynolds’ Other America.

As is typical around this time of year, particularly since this is a deca-anniversary of his assassination, we are hearing a lot about the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. For the most part, depending on the political bent of the author, the commentary focuses on the degree to which we have or have not achieved his dream. But the question of whether we’ve made it is a deceptive one, because even though “I Have A Dream” was possibly his best speech, and certainly his most famous one, I don’t think that his dream was static enough to really measure. Moreover, by the time he got to “I Have Been To The Mountaintop,” I would say that his dream had changed somewhat. No longer was he focused primarily on Civil Rights; his view had expanded. He had begun to look at poverty in a far wider scope, including international poverty in his critiques.

What’s a little more interesting to me, though, is to consider the fact that 40 years after his death, King has pretty much become all things to all people. Among capital-C Conservatives, there is this intense focus on the line, “I have a dream that one day my four children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” (I’ve actually seen one blog that claims King as a conservative. (!)) For those people, I’m curious about how they deal with the rest of what King had to say. Taking that line in isolation sounds nice, and it seems like it would refute the concept of “identity politics,” only in many instances, it seems that that quote is used solely to justify some type of inaction; either something shouldn’t be done, or it should be stopped. (Mr. Connerly, I’m lookin at you.) Only problem is, that takes the quote squarely out of its context. It seems to me that many of the people who use that quote now do so because they feel that people with their skin color are being held back, not out of concern for the content of anybody’s character. Or maybe I should say that being selfish creatures, we tend to automatically give ourselves a check in the ‘character’ box, so when we think somebody else got what we wanted, it must be due to something else. Only thing is, these jokers railing against Affirmative Action must be out of their minds if they think the situation in which they’re using Dr. King’s phrase is identical to, nearly the same as, or even mildly resembles the situation in the South in the early 1960s. As such, attempts to reuse that phrase are misguided at best, intellectually dishonest at worst.

Now that’s not to say that I don’t think that a “raceless” society is not an admirable goal, because it is. I just don’t think that the ones who made it that way can change it, because they’re not the ones who really feel the effect of what happened. In a way, it’s like a relationship where one partner cheated. Even though the cheating party brought the 3rd party into the relationship, it’s the one who got cheated on who ultimately lets that person out of the relationship, even if the 3rd party has been physically absent for a good deal of time. White folks writ large cannot make a case for a raceless society because white folks writ large both engineered and benefited from keeping the society race-based. Because of that, it’s not hard to believe that most “colorblind” talk on their part is a means to keep the status quo, since we know that even with the advances Black folks have made, there’s still a significant disparity in the way folks are treated. And no, I’m not talkin about no multivariable super-statistic, like wealth creation or infant mortality, which can be explained by any of a number of factors. I’m talkin about fairly straightforward stuff like whether a person with an identifiably Black name’s resume gets rejected when the resume of a white-sounding name (which I probably have) gets a call. I’m talkin about the fact that a first-time Black offender is more likely to get time for the same crime than a white offender. That’s straight-up one-to-one comparison. When you can tell me those types of vestiges of racism are gone, or at least statistically insignificant, then it’s time to declare race as a factor completely dead. Until then, while I personally believe it’s not as much of a factor as it once was, I can’t be mad when I hear somebody who thinks differently.

Tower of Power once said that hipness is what it is - but sometimes it is what it ain’t. Substitute ‘blackness’ for ‘hipness’ (and there’s a certain extent to which I think that was kinda the unstated point in the first place), and you got somethin. I ain’t gon’ lie, I’m always kinda surprised when I hear somebody espouse some notion of values-based Blackness - ‘if you ain’t/don’t/ [insert favorite item here], you ain’t really Black.’ I mean, I jokingly do it too. Just the other day, I was ribbing a friend of mine because she went to an HBCU and doesn’t play spades. I was all like, “You do like chicken and corn bread, don’t you?” But that’s nothing, because everybody at the table knew I wasn’t the least bit serious. There are some people who make that type of value judgment and mean it. I can’t quite understand that way of thinking, though. Personally, I think Blackness is existential. I mean that in both psychological terms as well as in a more ‘playing-with-the-word-exist’ way. Basically, my premise is that whatever Blackness is, it’s not something that can be measured and defined in the way that we’re used to talking about it. There is no ’standard’ to apply, no way to measure the some degree of Blackness. It is what it is. And it is what it ain’t.

What makes existential Blackness hard for some people to see is that they’re not really used to seeing Blackness as an entity unto itself; they’re used to seeing it as the contrast to whiteness. Obviously, if you use whitness to measure Blackness, the more something seems to be similar to what white people do, the less Black it is. Only thing is, that’s a flawed concept. If Blackness is existential, as I think it is, then it’s not measurable by anything other than itself. You can’t look at white to tell what Black is. Hence, while I know what somebody means when they say “talking white,” that phrase as a reflection (rejection?) of a person’s Blackness holds no meaning. (In a way, it’s like the term “Uncle Tom.” Yeah, I know what people mean when they use that term, but I don’t get how that literary figure came to represent handkerchief-headed obsequiousness. Tom died to ensure the freedom of the sistren. If that ain’t militant, I don’t know what is.) Really, the whole concept of “acting white” in general is antithetical to the idea of self-defined Blackness.

Now in saying all that, I can’t act like there aren’t some cats who I think might be happier if they weren’t Black. Obviously there’s no real way to know, so it’s just me projecting my logic onto their actions, which is a no-no. Nevertheless, when I hear Peterson or Connerly, or somebody who’s Black but uses ‘they’ when referring to Black people, my first inclination is to cast some aspersion on their Blackness. But I hafta check myself. Cuz as much as Blackness is what it is, it sometimes is what it ain’t.

Mike Huckabee on Rev. Wright’s controversial comments:

And one other thing I think we’ve gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

He gets it. While I may have my theological and philosophical beefs with liberation theology and some of its logical progeny, I know that in most cases, it ain’t wrong, even if it ain’t right. Considering that American racism is antecedent in the development of liberation theology in the first place, and especially considering the tepid-at-best response of the Evangelical community during the Civil Rights movement, I’m not exactly sure why some people are acting like they can’t figure where Reverend Wright is coming from. And I’m sayin’ - I don’t even necessarily agree with him all that tough, but what he said didn’t come completely out of NOWHERE. It’s just extrabiblical.

I’d probably suffocate if I waited for all the self-styled conservatives who acted like the world was coming to an end, or that the justice system was broken when the Duke lacrosse team was falsely accused of rape to rise to the cause of Alton Logan, a Chicago man who was convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. They might, but I’m not gonna hold my breath. The long and short of the situation, according to the Sun Times, is this:

Though claims of innocence usually fall on deaf ears, Logan’s claims ring achingly true. A growing body of incontrovertible evidence says Logan did not kill Lloyd Wickliffe, a security guard gunned down at a South Side McDonald’s in 1982.
The latest evidence is a bombshell. In January, two attorneys shared a secret they have carried since 1982: Their client, cop-killer Andrew Wilson, had confessed to killing Wickliffe. But bound by a sacred duty of confidentiality to their client, the two lawyers kept quiet.

Point blank. Innocent man wrongfully convicted. Not wrongfully-charged, not with aspersions cast, wrongfully convicted. And incarcerated. For twenty-six years. Twenty-six. I was in 3rd grade when he was convicted. And after all this time, the evidence that could exonerate him has finally come to light. I’m assuming that the governor and/or the Attorney General will take care of that soon. However, what I’m really concerned about is not the fact that the wheels of justice grind slowly. Even though race is not explicitly an issue in this case, I’m only slightly concerned about the fact that yet another Black man has spent the majority of his life after being convicted of a crime for which he was ultimately found to be innocent. (It matters, but I’m not sure whether we just don’t hear about the wrongfully-convicted white dudes, or if they just don’t get wrongfully convicted. My assumption is that it’s the former, albeit at a much lower rate.) Naw, the big problem is the predictability with which certain politically-affiliated entities seem to work. If the “victim” is white? It’s a problem. The system needs changing. Somebody needs to be held accountable for something. Otherwise, not so much. Proof? See: Duke lacrosse, any given Affirmative Action question…defenders of the confederate battle flag. I don’t even hafta name names, but you already know who I’m talking about and what they’d say.

Not like this tendency is confined to one side of the ideological spectrum. Only thing is, the focus goes from the victim to the perpetrator. In those cases, if the perpetrator is white, THEN it’s indicative of some serious flaw in the system and it demonstrates the need for dire change. Otherwise, meh. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. There usually is some protest, but it tends to lack the level of fervency that would accompany the same situation if the offender were of a different race.

It is what it is. In something of a twist on Cobb’s post, my perception is that most people’s concern is not at all about justice. It’s about the justification of their ideological position – for whatever purposes there might be.

I guess some things never cease to amaze me. Take, for instance, the fact that certain forms of racism seem to be so pervasive. Intellectually, I already know it, but when I see specific instances, it can be nearly mind-boggling. Last weekend, I saw this report on the 20/20 website where they had two groups of three teenagers, one white and one Black, vandalizing a parked car in a mostly-white neighborhood. Predictably, the police got more calls about the Black vandals than about the white vandals. Surprising to me was the ratio: 10 9-1-1 calls about the Black boys, one 9-1-1 call about the white boys. I might’ve expected a 2:1 ratio, or maybe even 3:1, but 10:1? Wow. But then, that’s part of the experiment. What was even more interesting to me was the unintentional part. WHILE the white chaps were tearin’ up the car, there were some black dudes asleep in a nearby car. THEY got more 9-1-1 calls for being asleep in the car then the white dudes got for vandalizing a car.

Amazing.

But then, you hafta approach stuff like this with a modicum of intelligence. Okay, we know that white folks call the police on Black folks quicker. We been knew that. But is that simply a result of racism, or are there other explanatory variables? I mean, the type of damage they did to the car as the people passed by was quite egregious, so it’s not like they could say they didn’t know anything was wrong, but it would’ve been interesting to see what might’ve happened if they had run a similar experiment in an equivalent Black neighborhood. Do we call the police quicker on white folks, too? That, I think, is a question worth asking.

As has become common, the most interesting part to these news(?) stories is the comments that are posted on the websites. The number of comments, presumably by white readers, that try to nullify the results because there was no corresponding experiment done in a Black neighborhood is astounding. It’s like, ‘yeah, that’s what happened, but it doesn’t really mean anything.’ That’s false. It definitely means something, the question is, what?

That racism still exists is not debatable. I don’t think it’s up for too much discussion that people tend to notice people who are different first. That’s partially why arguments on gentrification tend to focus on white people, as if there aren’t Black gentrifiers. (In some areas, there are more Black gentrifiers, they’re just invisible. But that’s another discussion.) Given that, I think there’s some small explanation of the results, but not enough to totally nullify the results.

In watching the movie, A Soldier’s Story (for the 25th time), I’m once again struck by Sergeant Waters. While his treatment of C.J. Memphis was certainly despicable, there’s a part of me that understands where he was coming from. Being that I self-identify as the “chitlins, collard greens, cornbread style,” I obviously don’t agree with that piece of Waters’ philosophy, but the idea that there are certain elements that the Black race can’t afford doesn’t seem entirely off. As I’m wont to say, it ain’t right, but it ain’t exactly wrong.

In a way, though, I guess that makes me wonder whether there is a Black race. ‘A’ meaning one. As in the antithesis of the phrase I picked up from Zora Neale Hurston, “my skinfolks but not my kinfolks.” Not too long ago, the idea was posited that people of my generation and younger are increasingly starting to see the fissures in the Black “community” as permanent, to the extent that some people would actually redefine Black folks as separate races. Personally, I don’t know if I’d go that far with it. I certainly think that there are different cultures within Black America, but to suggest that there are different Black “races” seems to hyperbolize to the point of losing a very important idea. I suppose, however, that since race as we know it is in large part a social construct with some points of biological basis, one definition is just as good as any.

Bearing that in mind, would a 2008 Sarge be content with exiling those he saw as unfit to a different “race” than himself, would he be more interested in physical separation, or would he still be looking to personally destroy them? And as a counter question, if we know that certain elements within our community do, in fact, behave in ways that are detrimental to our community, then at what point are we complicit in our own destruction because we DON’T react like Ol’ Sarge?

Just wonderin.

Duane at Black Informant raises an interesting question: how much of a singer’s appeal comes from their looks? Specifically, he frames the discussion in the terms of a conversation he had with his wife on whether Beyonce would be as popular if she were dark-skinned. He later juxtaposes this with the assertion that many, if not most popular rappers, who are male, are dark-skinned.

It’s interesting, because I had never really thought about it too much, but as I go through the list of popular female singers in my mind, I can’t really think of any dark-dark sisters. Not now, at least. Historically, there’s Chaka Khan, although she didn’t have all that much crossover appeal.

I’m not sure what this signifies. Given that we don’t really control the industry or have our own means of distribution, I don’t know that it’s possible to say that the onus is entirely on us; certainly if crossover appeal is the goal, then darker-skinned sisters would likely have a harder go of it. This is especially true nowadays, when being a singer is more about being The Package than it is about actually being a good singer. At the same time, it’s not exactly like there aren’t and haven’t been skin color issues within the Black community.

I think I need to puzzle over this some more.

Ambivalent is one of my kids’ vocabulary words this week. It’s apropos to my feelings on some of what I’ve been reading.

The item in question: via both The War On Folly and Dr. Spence, I’ve seen this website, Racism Review. Now on the one hand, I generally take a fairly dim view of itemizing instances of racism, because I’m not sure what the point is, except to remind us that racism isn’t dead. But we know that. We been knew that. The occurrence of individual acts of racism doesn’t necessarily signify anything greater than the fact that there are individual racists out there. I certainly don’t think that the fact that there’s a Klan rally somewhere, for instance, signifies that The Master Plan ™ is working. Moreover, I don’t know that it’s productive to focus on something that has real, but limited effects on our progress - or maybe I should say limited effects, relative to the things over which we have complete control. Yeah, racism is real, and it’s really out there, but if we need there to be no racism for us to make progress, we in bad shape.

At the same time, because my general assumption is that people know and acknowledge the reality of racism, I’m always surprised when I see the reaction to racist actions. Take, for instance, this incident in Lancaster County, PA. What’s surprising to me is not what happened, it’s the reaction of the townspeople. They acted like nothing had happened. Even as I recognize that individual racism is not necessarily indicative of a conspiracy, I also know that racism is malicious, and when people who are not racist refuse to acknowledge its existence, racism has found the perfect environment in which to thrive. As it was once said, “The Devil’s best trick is to make people believe he doesn’t exist.” As long as people can sit idly by and chalk up cases of obvious, virulent racism to some type of ‘boys-will-be-boys,’ societal change is impossible.

So then, I have some type of reconciliation, right? It’s important to highlight instances of racism because it draws attention to it and makes people who would otherwise be unaware that it really does exist, right? Well, no. The people who believe racism exists don’t really need more evidence, and the people who need proof tend to not believe it even when they see it — unless it happens somewhere else.

Yeah, Aaron’s right, I should have posted the picture. I just wanted to retain the element of surprise, because seriously - a light-skinned party? For real? In 2007?

Well, as it turned out, there was a tremendous b(l)acklash, so it didn’t go down. From the Detroit News…

DETROIT — A local DJ and party promoter retreated Thursday from a plan to sponsor a bash that would let “light-skinned” black women into a downtown club for free.

But the “Light Skin Libra Birthday Bash” at Club APT on Woodward Avenue turned out to be a bashing — of promoter Ulysses “DJ Lish” Barnes after word of the unusual party spread on the Internet.

“I made a mistake,” Barnes said. “I didn’t think there would be a backlash.”

Barnes, who said he’s been a party promoter for six years, canceled the event.

He said he has gotten angry calls and e-mails from around the country about the party.

“I didn’t mean to offend anyone,” he said. “I had planned a party for other shades (of black women). We were going to take a shade of color each week. Next week was going to be a party for ‘Sexy Chocolate’ and the week after that ‘Sexy Caramel.’?”

Is he serious? Even if that was his master plan, and that explanation is specious enough, he couldn’t have come up with another, “friendlier”(?) adjective, like he did with ’sexy chocolate’ and ’sexy caramel’? (Seriously. This dude’s a party promoter, and that’s the best he could come up with? Where’s Don King? I bet HE could’ve busted out with a fancy name.)