Why "I'm not a racist" is only half the story - a Big Think video by Robin DiAngelo

In a recent article at The Guardian, best selling author, Robin DiAngelo, offers her critique of why racism persists, particularly within intellectual liberal communities:

“The problem with white people,” she says, “is that they just don’t listen. In my experience, day in and day out, most white people are absolutely not receptive to finding out their impact on other people. There is a refusal to know or see, or to listen or hear, or to validate.”

One of the ongoing challenges for me in my writing is keeping my communication information rich and intellectual, but also simple and useful , which is something DiAngelo has mastered as seen in this video:

The article at The Guardian is found here.

From Slavery to Subprime Loans

One of the headings I'm using in the introduction of my book Beyond Oppression: Colonization and the Language of Heroes is "From Slavery to Subprime Loans."  And there's an article out today at Truthout that talks about this in some detail.  The piece, by Jon Jeter, is entitled "Flat Broke, Black Voters Want More Than Just Another Black President," and here are some highlights:

What has befallen Black America is the heist of the century, a Ponzi scheme so cataclysmic that it has not only capsized the global economy, but it has also shone a light on slavery’s vibrant afterlife, in which the African-American proletariat has been assigned the role of a permanent debtor class.

And while President Obama held no one accountable for the 2007-08 financial [fraud] crash, Jeter points out that both President Reagan and President H. W. Bush got indictments and sent hundreds of bankers to jail

During the savings and loan crisis, for example, the Department of Justice, under the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, jailed hundreds of them, including Charles Keating, whose Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal cost taxpayers $3.4 billion.

The failure of Lehman Brothers in 2008 cost taxpayers nearly 10 times that amount, and yet the Obama administration did not prosecute a single Wall Street executive for malfeasance. Indeed, the nation’s first Black president bailed out everyone except the very people who were swindled out of their homes and life-savings

And really, in my view, the crux of the Black dilemma in America is that every aspect of the culture, including our education system, financial system, political system and system of justice, is a minefield designed to strip African-Americans of wealth and dignity at any and every opportunity, which Jeter speaks to here:

In a material sense, slavery has continued practically unabated. Consider that when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Black people owned one-half of 1 percent of all assets in the U.S. More than a century-and-a half later, according to The Color of Money, by Mehrsa Baradaran, the Black share of the nation’s total wealth has doubled to all of 1 percent. For all intents and purposes, Black Americans have no greater stake in the country of our birth than what we had when the first recorded African stepped foot in the “New World” in 1619.

Jeter's article is found here. 

Racial Categories and the Emergence of Miscegenation

A Redenção de Cam (Redemption of Ham) by By Modesto Brocos (Image: Wikipedia) 

A few days ago I received an email from a friend in Seattle that had several links to articles about American history, with a particular focus on African-American history.  One of the links went to an article entitled "The Miscegenation Troll," which is about how the term Miscegenation - nomenclature for romantic and sexual interracial relationships - came about.  In response to the article, I commented on it in an email to my friend saying:

I am glad you sent me this if for no other reason than one of the articles offers some research material for one of my book projects.  In regards to the story about the the Miscegenation pamphlet, I did not know this history.  While the whole thing is a good read, the part about the pamphlet's author denigrating the Irish was a surprise, especially considering so many Black American's are have Irish relatives.  Reading about the pamphlet helped me see my own work a little differently - as less radical and intense as I sometimes fear certain aspect's are.

As I suspect you are aware, racial categories have no scientific [biological] support, which the statement of "in the first place: Before one can speak of “mixed races,” one must believe the races are separate enough" essentially alludes to in the article.

Also as the article states, the abolitionist pamphlet was a hoax; carried out by 2 journalist for a newspaper that was against the abolition of slavery.  And yet, hoax or not, we know that above and beyond Strom Thurmond, for instance, there had to be plenty of White segregationists sexually (romantically?) involved with African-Americans throughout our history - otherwise who sired all the nation's mulattos, quadroons and octaroons?

The article in question is found here.