We Don't Need No Thought Control

Another Brick in the Wall - Richard Cheese (mp3)

This week, California passed a law that requires the LGBT community be positively represented in future history textbooks in public schools. It also, according to news reports, “bans materials that reflect negatively on gays.”

Hurm.

I remember adults in the late 1980s talking about Martin Luther King, Jr. I don’t remember which adults, but I know they were white, and I know they were members of my church and friends of my parents and neighbors, and I know they were less than exhilarated about the man getting his own federal holiday.

“He was a serial adulterer,” they’d say.
“He was a Commie,” they’d say. “A real member of the Communist party!”
“He had bastard children and wouldn’t acknowledge or support them,” they’d say.

As a sheltered, naive Southern teenager, I can’t say for sure what I thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., or his significance, or what he did for our country. In hindsight, I must acknowledge a failure to grasp the gravitas of his place in our nation’s history. I knew he was important, but not, like, THAT important.

A lot of white people felt threatened by the holiday. Like acknowledging MLK’s greatness was just another way of telling them they were bad people, their parents were bad people. Their reaction was defensive. Not an excuse, but an explanation. In hindsight, I wish I had somehow realized the truth sooner.

It’s taken decades of experience and wisdom to get beyond the racism I witnessed or overheard as a kid. Most of it was relatively mild, lingering in my experiences like cigarette smoke in a hotel room. One could reasonably argue that I'll spend the rest of my life without ever fully getting past it all. I wonder if any laws could have prevented or further restricted this pollution from my mind, this reminder of who we are and who we aren’t, of black and white and different and better.

Somehow the racist mutterings around me never quite penetrated my circle of closest friends. Having a circle that included representation by several minorities didn't hurt.... but none of my friends were gay. Or, at least, I didn’t know it if they were.

Homosexuality wasn’t obvious to me in the '80s. I didn’t have a “gay-dar” as a kid. The first time I ever remember fully realizing there were actual gay people walking and living around me -- not just singing rock songs or taking homoerotic photographs, but actually going to school with us and stuff -- was 1985.

At the same time I was introduced to Lamar Latrell on the big screen, Rock Hudson died of AIDS, and it totally freaked out my mom and her friends, because suddenly this cat over whom they had drooled in their younger years is discovered to be, as the nomenclature went, “a sissy.” But that year was just the first big brick. Plenty of bricks had to fall, and the fell gradually through high school and into college.

The more comfortable I became with my own sexuality, the less homosexuality frightened me, the less it felt like some problem. The more I saw friends from childhood and high school come out, the more I felt convinced it wasn’t some fashion statement or attempt at rebellion and instead a long-overdue disclosure of their real being.

As a kid, homophobia was the Godzooky to racism’s Godzilla. Gay culture was still very hushed and hidden around me, and I don’t know if people felt threatened by it the way they were in the 90s and this past decade.

I provide my past experience and weaknesses to this because it seems only fair to do so. That I believe gays should have the right to marry, that I believe Gay Is The New Black in American prejudicial fashion, that I believe an overwhelming majority of gay Americans are expressing their natural inclination and not a lifestyle choice, none of these clears me from a lifetime of living in relative cluelessness and surrounded by -- sometimes sharing in -- prejudicial notions.

This California law, requiring positive examples of LGBT people in history and forbidding negative ones, is a frightening attempt at thought control, and there’s no other way of putting it.

I recently wrote about Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, an absolutely fabulous book for high school kids to read, for both its historical information and its compelling story. If our state had passed a law similar to California’s, and if this law was about the Japanese rather than homosexuals, would we be able to read this book, a book that is frank and fair about Japanese both good and bad, both soldier and citizen, a book that identifies many horrific acts yet also acknowledges their culture and humanity?

I would find such a law horrifying if it protected and promoted Christians, or the Japanese, or penguins. It is no less bad or dangerous for having the LGBT community at heart.

Or, to put it another way, as a friend quoted on Facebook: “Propoganda must not investigate the truth objectively... it must present only that aspect of truth which is favorable to its own side.”

When your actions reflect the words of some dude named Adolf, it’s probably a bad idea.

Nnnnnnnnot Gonna Do It!

The Yellow Brick Road Song - Iyeoka (mp3)

Michael Chabon sure knows how to handle a story involving his children, his opinions, and the use of the dreaded, nuclear N-word.* His harrowing tale is in The Atlantic Online.

The beauty of admiring someone from afar is that, if lucky, one need not be exposed to that afar-person’s inevitable multitude of imperfections. From the proper distance, large imperfections can often seem trite and forgettable. So when I say I admire Michael Chabon, I don’t really know what the hell I’m talking about beyond my admiration of his mastery of writing and clearly sharp-as-hell intellect. His wife seems funny and cool and also sharp-as-hell and, um, Jewish. And his collection of essays Manhood for Amateurs is one of the best books of its kind I’ve ever read. (Not to mention that The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay was the most comic book nerd-educating fiction-based 4-million-page novel ever written.)

But I hardly know the man. All the better to try and admire him. Less reality and truth to get in the way. I can just focus on his Atlantic essay.

Our world is indeed a messy one, and in few circumstances does it become more powerfully clear to me than when one word is at the center of the story. (“I’ll take ‘6-Letter Words That Begin With “N”’ for $1,000, Alex!”)**

My immediate reaction about the censorship and N-bleaching of Huck Finn was visceral and certain. How dare they. Screw them. Mind control from the PC universe. More refusal to accept that sometimes ugly things are a part of our heritage, a part of our history. Next thing you know, they’ll start scrubbing out the murders and deaths from the Bible, along with the polygamy, incest and rapes. And they’ll take Piggy out of Lord of the Flies and replace him with a thin and muscular computer-generated Brad Pitt.

These were the kinds of holier than thou thoughts I had.

Yet in the back of my mind, I can enjoy this uncompromising vitriol knowing damn well I’ll never actually have to put my money where my mind is, because I’m not an English teacher. Having a conversation about the N-word with my children, even with Huck Finn as a jumping-off point, is a universally different challenge than being a teacher of dozens upon dozens of students, students of varying social and economic backgrounds, ethnicities, religions, and so forth.

The fact that I hang out with cool English teachers, that I come from a long line of English teachers, that I majored in the damn subject... well, all of these factoids are sleights of mental hand. They ultimately mean nothing. They are weightless, because none of it translates into me sitting in a melting pot of a classroom with adolescents, millions of varying chemicals all boiling within those bodies, millions of chemical reactions both internal and external ready to ignite with any wrong step or poor choice of words.

Parenting and teaching are similar in certain aspects. Both, most of the time, are much easier than parents or teachers want to let on. Same goes for firefighters or policemen. Only on TV shows are those dudes always fighting fires and solving crimes. In reality, they’re spending most of their time sitting around and waiting for the s#*t to hit the fan. Parents and teachers are the same way.***

But then, after weeks or months of calm seas and relatively easy lesson plans, something like the N-word in Huck Finn comes up. The 4-alarm fire of English classes. That’s what they’re paid to do, right? That’s the kind of fire that stirs up a good teacher’s passions, right? Um, right?

I raise my glass to the teachers who can manage a discussion about the N-word in such a way that helps and strengthens their students rather than harming them. I wonder if the ones who think they do this well are actually the ones who pull it off. I wonder just how many of these teachers are out there in our schools. If English Teachers were marksmen and Huck Finn a sniper rifle, how many of them do we actually trust taking that shot, knowing they’ll hit the target?

“Not enough” is the only correct answer.

I can’t help but think of this guy: Hardly Working: Cool English Teacher.

P.S. The fact that this post is entirely without focus and rambling speaks precisely to how wigged out I get just attempting to write a post about an author who wrote an essay about a book written to scrub out the damn word from The Single Greatest Work of American Literature Ever.

* -- The N-word in question is not “nuclear.”


** -- I totally just wrote that so I could embed quotes inside quotes inside quotes, thus paying homage to the dream within a dream within a dream in Inception.


*** -- And all of these jobs don’t pay squat relative to their worth when the s#*t indeed does hit the fan.

Black Like Me (or my car)

Bob Dylan--"Hurricane (live)" (mp3)

Last Thursday night, little old white suburban me was racially-profiled.

Or at least my car was. Previous adventures with my 1995 dark green Toyota Camry have been related on this site, but I guess I've never really described the car. Even though my father-in-law bought it for driving around a retirement community in Florida, we have always thought that it was "pimped." In addition to its dark color, he had some kind of extra-dark tint put on the windows, I'm sure because of his cataracts and the hot Florida sun.

I have since tried to remove said tint, but only with partial success. It was put on very, very well, and while portions of it have peeled off, much of it remains, impossible for the amateur to remove and with the resultant outcome that the car, or at least the windows, look like they have one of those skin conditions where there are two different blotchy shades of pigment.

The car also looks just plain dark, and in addition to a front right side scrape that my wife had driving a child to school, it also has a pretty good dent on the passenger side where a woman without insurance hit me in a Bi-Lo parking lot and I just said to her, "It's an old car. Don't worry about it."

And bumper stickers. One reads "I (heart) New Orleans," one reads "Dino Jr.," and one reads "Grateful Dead," but if you just saw the stickers and didn't bother to examine them, coupled with the various dents, scrapes, and peeling, darkened windows, you might be inclined to think a poor person, probably a poor black person was driving the car (instead of a white person drowning in college tuition).

At least if you are a cop.

Here's what happened: my friend Steve and I were driving down a major road headed to our usual Thursday night sports bar destination. It's about a three mile drive, and I noticed after about a mile a police car sitting in a parking lot to our right as we drove past. I checked my speed; I was under the 40 mph limit.

I thought as we went down the road that maybe he had pulled out after us, but, completely within the limits of the law, I thought little of it. At a stoplight at a major intersection, all of a sudden he was right behind us. He didn't do anything, but as soon as the light turned green and we went through it, his blue lights came on and we pulled over on the left side of the road. We had not done anything wrong during the entire drive to that point.

(Let me backtrack: the day before, I had had my car inspected since the tags expired on Oct. 31, and, at the last second, before I drove to Steve's house, I went back inside mine to see if, by some chance, my new sticker had arrived in the mail. It had. I put it on the license plate, picked him up, and we went on our way.)

When he walked up to my window, he said, "Did you just put that sticker on your license plate recently?" "Yes," I said, "Just tonight." "Well," he said, "It isn't in our system. I'll need your driver's license and insurance card." Which I provided.

Now, if you're following this confusing narrative, here's what you know: he can't have known that my updated license plate wasn't in the system until after I drove by him and until after he pulled out and followed me and until after he ran my tags at the stop light. All with my having done nothing wrong.

So, he came back and handed me my papers and said, "You're good to go. Your new registration just wasn't in our system yet." As if the pattern of his actions was normal and made sense. Um, officer, I'm thinking, and you ran my tags why?

Now, I ask you, who gets pulled over for doing absolutely nothing? Hint: it isn't a white, moderately-affluent school teacher at a private school.

Or, shall I ask you this: when you see a car pulled over by the side of the road with blue lights flashing behind it, what kind of car is it, typically? If you said, an older, worn-out looking, seen some hard times kind of vehicle, well, at least in Chattanooga, you'd win a prize!

There were a number of police cars on Brainerd Road that night, and they were all interacting with cars like mine, it being the end of the month and a good chance to generate some extra income with fines for expired tags.

Maybe I should have taken him on, told him that I knew exactly what was going on, that I knew he thought I was black and that's why he pulled out after my car and decided to run my tags through the computer. But you know what? I don't mess with police. Not in any way, shape, or form. I appreciate their help when I need it, but when I don't, I don't trust them to behave with liberty and justice for all. Especially not with someone who can expose what they are doing wrong. I'm chickenshit that way.

A Glitch in the Step Matrix

Bit by Bit (from Fletch) - Stephanie Mills (mp3)
Work Itself Out - Roadside Graves (mp3)

Progress, it must be remembered, is best as a dance, not a march.

Often the only way forward also requires steps to the side, and steps back. Marching is against human nature. It's forced, not organic. When progress is forced, it creates friction, tension, unease. Dancing, on the other hand, requires an understanding of what the body's natural inclinations are, combined with tons of practice and work. But dancing, when done right, is not forced. It is free of tension. It looks completely fluid and simple. Thus the lovely saying, "Free your mind, and your ass will follow."

So let's apply this notion to the progression of race relations in America. Specifically, what happens to this progress when a white sorority gets all uppity and wins a national step competition?

That's exactly the question forced upon us this February in Atlanta, when the Zeta Tau Alpha chapter of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville won the Sprite Step Off.

Most of BOTG's readers, I suspect, know little if any about Stepping. Personally, I'm only just knowledgeable and educated enough to get myself in trouble. When I was a freshman, my dorm RA was the president-elect of UNC's Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, and because he was easily the most influential African-American presence in my young and clueless life to that point, I was given several mini-lectures on the history and significance of stepping. I also witnessed two official step shows and at least a dozen impromptu step performances in the Pit outside the school's main dining hall.

Something about the live performance, about witnessing a step show happen right there in front of you, multiplies the power of the experience. In this, it's very much like hockey, which in my opinion is the sport whose awesomeness is the most powerfully affected by watching it live. (Football, soccer and basketball, on the other hand, translate far too well to TV, which is why they are the world's most popular sports.)

Anyway, a bunch of white chicks from Arkansas won a national competition intended for, if not explicitly exclusive to, historically-black sororities. When they were announced as winners to the predominantly-black Atlanta audience, the crowd reacted by gathering in a circle, holding up empty soda bottles, and announcing that they'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

Ha. Of course that wasn't the reaction.

Here was the reaction, according to the Washington Post.

Here was the reaction, according to The Root.com.

If you read the YouTube comments -- thousands of them -- in response to the various videos of their performance (a 2-minute excerpt is embedded at the bottom of this post), you will see a display of all levels of IQ, knowledge, and tolerance warring and wrestling with what all of this means.

Here's my reaction to the reaction.

First, the immediate and negative response of the crowd was something any idiot should have seen coming. History is full of competitions where a square peg attempts to fit in a traditionally round hole, emerges victorious, and is consequently despised by large parts of the traditional public. Jackie Robinson. Althea Gibson. Calvin Peete. Lamar Latrell. Daniel Laruso. Herbie The Love Bug. But I digress.

We look back on these moments and admire the people (or cars) involved. People my age tend to undervalue and underappreciate the struggles and scorn the great groundbreaking athletes endured. There's no way I, at 38 and white, can truly appreciate appreciate that, when Hank Aaron rounded the bases after breaking Maris' home run record, it lingered in the back of his mind that someone might well try to kill him.

It is entirely irrational to look to a bunch of binge-drinking white college chicks from Arkansas to be game-changers in the world of racial progress. But, if you look at the dance of progress in history, we must at least acknowledge that what happened that February night in Atlanta will be considered a vital and important "step" in this never-ending move towards something better. (Sorry for the pun. Couldn't help it.)

Now if we can just get Darius Rucker to win the seed spitting contest at the Redneck Olympics, our dance of racial progress will surely be complete.

Asparagus Spears

It All Comes Back to Me - Sergeant (mp3)
I'll Say I'm Sorry Now - Shawn Colvin (mp3)

Popular culture doesn't determine our opinions, but it certainly has the power of The Big Nudge. It can sway us to reconsider our views where traditional discussions with authority figures or friends cannot. It can present us a new reality -- sometimes misleading -- that creates doubt about our own (mis)conceptions. For someone like myself, who grew up scuba diving in the deep end of the pop culture pool, the power of The Big Nudge is even bigger.

What's The Big Nudge? I've previously mentioned the educational importance of Public Enemy and comic books on me, so I'll go with another one: the 1992 Eddie Murphy movie Boomerang, which among other things put the sweat-inducing Halle Berry on the map. Boomerang ain't high art, and it loses a lot of its momentum down the stretch, but some of the scenes in the film became a part of my college lexicon.

Although the plot of the film surrounds Eddie Murphy and his sexual and business prowess, issues of race flow in and out. Only in a movie could I witness three financially successful black businessmen converse in a  relaxed friendly whiteless atmosphere. Not because it wasn't true, but because it was beyond my realm. The dialogue and their conversations, much like a Spike Lee Joint or a Singletary film, were -- even if not completely true to life -- revelatory.

In one scene, a waitress is going over some menu options with them, and she refers to "asparagus spears." After she leaves, the Martin Lawrence character -- always the one eager to point out what is "racial" about our society -- unleashes his fury that she chose the word "spear." If we were white, she would have said asparagus tips, he insists.

Later, we get this awesome scene:



My best friend and I used to read sex into everything. [Sidebar. Stay with me.] We forced it into places it had no business. The more ludicrous, the more fun. We were Michael Scott that's what she said goobers back when it was even nerdier and more pathetic than it is in 2010. We're a teensy bit better about it now.

A few years ago, I was talking with a distant relative who's an avid hunter and gun collector. He was so well-versed in weaponry that every time I would ask about something -- a Colt .45? a 9mm? -- he would explain how weak and pathetic those weapons were compared to... well, I don't remember, but he could rattle off names and brands. To him, some pedestrian gun hardly deserved to be called a firearm. Meanwhile, I'm thinking, Geez, a gun is a gun is a gun.

When you can turn something as harmless as the phrase "pressure washing my deck" into kindling for sex guffaws, words lose some of their power. When every Portabella must be a phallus, symbols lose heft. When it comes to words and symbolism and power, I fear I've become like that relative. I've lost respect for the power of mere words, to my own detriment.

The playwright and screenwriter David Mamet feasts on words like early A.D. lions on the flesh of Christian babies, and his most incendiary plays have the feel of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, where sides are drawn and stances are taken, but where no one is ever completely in the right.

Although by no means a great movie, Mamet's Oleanna is a haunting portrayal of dynamics. It's about authority and education and gender and sex and the abuse of all those things. (Oh, but to have seen the play...) My point is, it's all about the power and influence of words.

In December, Mamet released the Oleanna of race relations, titled... RACE. Starring, appropriately, David Alan Grier from Boomerang. (Hear a fascinating interview with David Alan Grier on NPR.)

Here's a line from James Spader's character in RACE: "There is nothing a white person can say to a black person about race which is not both incorrect and offensive. Nothing. I know that. Race is the most incendiary topic in our history, and the moment it comes out, you cannot close the lid on that box. That may change, but not for a long, long while."

Meanwhile, in Chattanooga, there's this white guy with a big Internet soap box making use of just that issue*. And what frustrates is how his point, much of which feels right, gets clouded over by his comfort in talking about race. Everytime I try writing about any issue where race must be acknowledged, I feel equally foolish and counterproductive... just on a much smaller soap box. My reaction tends to be "Why am I even trying to express this stuff when it's invariably so charged and divisive?" You can't close the lid on that box.

Which is why I'm so very grateful to have been exposed to Stuff White People Do.

SWPD is my modern-day Boomerang. It exposes me to the frustrations and aggravations that I could not otherwise appreciate or understand. Sometimes it enrages me. Often it condemns me. I read this site the same way Jodie Foster enters Buffalo Bill's basement, blind in the darkness, my gun quaking in my hands, as I cluelessly feel around for a wall. But I feel drawn to go and deal with the demons in my own basement.

Each day I go and read that site -- and the fascinating comments it receives -- I feel like I'm learning something. I hope it's offering a vital Big Nudge.

* -- Another fight involving a loaded gun broke out again Wednesday at a predominately black school. This school, which any sane person knowledgeable of Chattanooga's public schools would acknowledge does a criminal disservice to the poor teens zoned to it, is the centerpiece of yet another controversy. The black community is upset that plans are being made to "fix" or "improve" the school. Sifting through reactions to the drama... well, it makes me think the quote from Spader's quote is all too true. I'm just too stupid to heed it.

Sho'Nuff!

The Last Dragon - Dwight David (mp3)
Burn Hollywood Burn - Public Enemy (mp3)

Last week, our school held a day where, among other events, seniors organized and led sessions addressing issues of cultural diversity. One of the sessions my students and I attended was entitled "African-Americans in Film: A Retrospective" or something like that. It was organized and presented by two African-American seniors.

They began their session by introducing us to the notion of minstrels and blackface, showing YouTube clips of moments from movies where this embarrassing part of our legacy took place. Very uncomfortable. A reality beyond what these guys understood. Good place to start.

They next moved to Hattie McDaniel's Oscar-winning turn as Scarlet O'Hara's slave Mammy in Gone with the Wind. The presenters said very little other than explaining the general ingredients of blackface and explaining that McDaniel went on to focus her career on roles that were less stereotypical and more empowering. (I don't know if that's true, as her IMDB shows a bunch of "Maid" and "Aunt ___" roles, so I'm not quite sure she experienced some sea change in roles offered to her.)

From there, they went straight to Driving Miss Daisy. I know they only had an hour, but they skipped half a century of film history.

They cited Morgan Freeman as one of the first essential black actors to play major roles in motion pictures, citing his role as Hoke Colburn as a critical moment in the advancement of roles for African-Americans. At which point I swear I heard Chuck D, somewhere in New York City, throw up a little in his mouth.

Driving Miss Daisy and Freeman's role in it, they said, opened up leading roles for African-Americans in film. They then cited The Book of Eli, I Am Legend, Shaft, Remember the Titans and American Gangster. I think they meant the version of Shaft with Samuel L. Jackson, but I didn't ask. They probably wouldn't know Richard Roundtree if he walked up and kicked their young butts like the bad mother (shut yo' mouth) he is.

"And now we would like to show you scenes from one of the first movies to use an African-American as the main actor," they said. Naturally, I'm thinking they might show scenes from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner or In the Heat of the Night or A Raisin in the Sun. You know, good old school Sidney Poitier shit.

The credits began to roll, and I heard the music, and I chuckled.

Yes, according to these two well-educated, relatively intelligent young black men, the actor known only as Taimak and making his film debut, who didn't even have another acting part for four years, was the first African-American to take the leading role in a film. In 1985.

If there are indeed 13 ways of looking at a blackbird, then surely there are a few ways to look at "The Last Dragon."

Here's the first way: It's shameful that two boys on the verge of college know so damn little about a subject that did seem of some importance to them.

Here's the second: for boys born in 1991, there's just not that much difference between 1939 and 1989. It's all just history. I remember when I was in high school, I didn't really give much of a crap about the timeline and where Lawrence Welk, Patti Page, Frankie and Annette, and Elvis fit. It was all just old music for old people, so turn that shit off and let me listen to Modern English already!! They're tubular!

Here's the third: Maybe their lack of knowledge is, in an oddball sort of way, a sign of just how far we've come. Perhaps it's accidentally a very encouraging statement for race and progress in America when young and educated African-American boys know so little about the history of African-Americans in film. It's a sign that, for as long as they've been alive and paying attention, inequality in film is a matter of degrees rather than a matter of extremity. They might not even know about Cooley High or Foxy Brown or "Blaxploitation" or, hell, even Richard Pryor. Or maybe they know about all that but don't really know where it plays in the timeline, why those names and words are kind of important when it comes to African-Americans in film.

According to their presentation, America went from blackface to blacks portraying slaves to Driving Miss Daisy to a land where Will Smith and Denzel Washington are two of the most bankable names in the business.

And that's the fourth way to look at it: maybe it's more or less that simple. Blackface to slave portrayal to Freeman's Hoke to I Am Legend, and the rest is just annoying details like Superfly or Lady Sings the Blues or -- one of my all-time favorite movies -- Do the Right Thing. Just details, those.

Except for this little gem of a movie, produced by Barry Gordy and Motown waaaaay back in 1985, in glorious Technicolor (TM), centered around a young black kung-fu stud named "Bruce" Leroy Green, who journeyed inward to his soul, and throughout Harlem, to discover the way to a sublime golden glow and proof that he was The Master.

Although I've hardly achieved a sublime glow when it comes to my level of racial understanding, the Public Enemy song "Burn Hollywood Burn" and Robert Townshend's movie "Hollywood Shuffle" were crucial eye-opening experiences for me as a teenager, slaps in the face about how clueless I was about the issue of black representation in film.

Under Your Skin...

Future Love Paradise - Seal (mp3)
Informer - Snow (mp3)

It was no surprise that in a liberal city like Austin (Texas), every parent was a welcoming multiculturalist, embracing diversity. But according to (Professor Birgitte) Vittrup's entry surveys, hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children directly about race. They might have asserted vague principles -- like "Everybody's equal" or "God made all of us" or "Under the skin, we're all the same" -- but they'd almost never called attention to racial differences. They wanted their children to grow up colorblind...

This paragraph, early on in a Newsweek feature story about children and discrimination, was one of those moments when I was very happy to be reading it in the exclusive privacy of a bathroom rather than in public. Because if others had been watching me read that paragraph (and many others after that one), they would have seen me begin to gulp and fidget and even look around, slightly paranoid that others might notice my discomfort.

In short, that paragraph describes with almost perfect accuracy how I've been trying to raise my daughters on matters of race.

And whenever our behavior or attitudes are called out in a national publication with such accuracy, trust me, it's never a good thing. It means we're fucking up somehow. And I knew it early on in this article. But I kept reading anyway, despite my gross discomfort.

When it comes to issues of race, when it comes to talking about race, I'm astonished anyone from my generation could feel comfortable with the subject.

I was raised by and surrounded by adults who couldn't even figure out their own opinions on the matter. Some of the most memorable "serious talks" my father had with me were about race. One of my father's co-workers at TVA was black, and he and his wife always attended the annual work parties my parents hosted.  On several occasions my father would that night or the following day explain to me that they were good people and equal in every way to everyone else at the party. He would talk about how proud he was that things had changed and improved so drastically since he was my age, because he had black friends who weren't even allowed to come to his front door or enter his house without clear permission from his mother, and she almost never gave permission.

Yet I also saw him struggle with those very prejudices.

Most specifically, I remember us watching Flash Gordon together on HBO back in '81 or '82, making me 9 or 10. There's a scene where Ming gets Dale Arden drunk on some Midori or something. In the scene, Dale is surrounded by a bunch of female "slaves," many of which were African-American, and I remember my father calling them several words. One or two I'd heard before and knew were wrong, and one or two I'd never heard before.

I realize in hindsight that Dad was shitface drunk when we were watching it. Not that intoxication excuses it for the general public, but it helps make sense of what seemed to me at the time as confusing contradiction.

Dad wanted to believe races were equal. He wanted to believe that America was quickly moving past inequality and injustice based on race. But deep down, he was constantly fighting this deep-seeded feeling that black people just weren't as smart, weren't as capable. He wasn't proud of it, but it rolled in like a mild thunderstorm once or twice a year. (If he managed to prevent passing that contagion down through another generation, isn't that at least a small victory?)

All I've ever felt when it comes to matters of race, my whole life, is a mixture of pity and fear. Pity because it's one of the few subjects where no one seems to be allowed to get over their ignorance because all ignorance gets labeled as racism, and being called a racist isn't conducive to a willingness to learn, and everyone on all sides sometimes seem doomed to be stuck in their own ruts because they either shut up and keep it to themselves or they speak up and get raked over the coals.

Fear because I've learned that shutting up is the best approach, and I absolutely hate shutting up.

In college, my freshman RA was a black guy named Chris. He was from inner-city D.C., and he was the President of his black fraternity, and he was sharp and confident and smooth. He was the first guy -- one of the few African-Americans I've met my whole life -- who could comfortably and calmly discuss things with white people who had a lot to learn (or, he'd say, unlearn).

At the time, there was a huge movement (and opposition) on campus for a stand-alone Black Student Union, and a group of guys from my floor got into this debate with Chris. "Y'all have this whole campus," he said. "All we want is one damn building."

"But the whole campus is yours, too," several guys retorted. "You're not excluded from anything or anywhere."

"But it's not ours. It's yours. We're just welcomed to visit."

Later that year, I walked into the Black Student Union -- it was just a couple of rooms inside the larger Student Union building at the time. I was so nervous my knees were buckling, and I honestly fought back tears. I wanted someone to explain to me why I was so scared to ask questions, why I felt so guilty for having done nothing, to my knowledge, that was hateful or cruel. What I couldn't deny, however, was having grown up with family members and, later, friends, who expressed racist opinions and used racist language. And I felt guilty just for being a part of it, for knowing it was out there, and that people who looked like me thought and said those things.

And I felt guilty because I had no idea what I was supposed to do about it or how to make it better.

The BSU's assistant director sat down with me. I don't remember much about the conversation. I remember her actually smiling and patting my shoulder and having a look of pity on her face. I remember her telling me that having the nerve just to come into the BSU and talk was a sign of courage and progress, and that my responsibility was to refuse to tolerate hearing expressions of prejudice from others.

Almost 20 years later, I still feel knots of fear and discomfort. I've tolerated some expressions of racism and expressed intolerance for others, but more of the former than the latter.

So when my daughter, at 5-years-old, referred to her black classmate as "tan," I didn't even try to clarify. We used that a lot in our house for a while. "Tan." It sounded good.

And when I did talk about race with them, it was in those vanilla (Neopolitan?) notions of "everyone's equal," "everyone's the same," yada yada. I was so afraid of educating them incorrectly that I ended up not educating them at all. And I'm using the past tense just to deceive myself, because it's not like I'm suddenly Daddy Diversity.

And I'm left to wonder, is this merely my failure, or are we as a society doomed to continue to fail until we can figure out a way to talk about it without being paralyzed by fear?

Suck Creek Discomfort

My Baby Loves Malt Liquor - Roger Alan Wade (mp3)
Nighttrain - Public Enemy (mp3)

An acquaintance of ours celebrated her 30th birthday last weekend by renting out a cabin on the outskirts of Chattanooga. The place is called -- with no sense of irony -- The Pot House. In many ways, it was the antithesis of my own party a week prior. My party was about inviting everything but the kitchen sink to join me, cram human bodies into small spaces and gab away like some wrinkling gray attempt at recreating a frat party. Her party was about getting away from the crowds, renting the cabin for a night, and inviting 40 or so people to stop by and stay as long as they liked from morning to late at night.

Getting to this cabin required driving down four long miles of curvy, semi-paved road off of Suck Creek. If you ever wondered why they named it Suck Creek, you only needed to drive this stretch of road. I'm pretty sure the only other option was to name it Meth Creek. And "Suck" just had a better ring to it.

What I'm about to observe will say much about my own issues of race and class. It's not particularly pretty, so there's a level of discomfort in even writing this. Some would say, "That's 'cuz you're supposed to keep these thoughts to yourself." And maybe they're right. But the problem with where we are as a culture right now, it seems to me, is that we're all so afraid of sounding ignorant or racist or bigoted that we don't ever even try to express ourselves. We're so afraid of being excoriated that we never get the opportunity to exchange ideas and perspectives in a truly deep and meaningful way. And without that exchange, how are our beliefs going to change?

We drove down this pothole-filled, winding road at 15 mph. On one bend, the houses were all overrun with trash in all shapes and sizes, from cars on cinder blocks to broken lawn chairs to piles of traditional garbage. A few hundred yards later, we'd drive past fairly nice houses, some over 2000 square feet and well-tended. Then a few more dumps. Then a few more nice ones. Some in-between.

"I'm so nervous," I told my wife. "I don't like this at all."

I live on the campus of a school that is a stone's throw from some fairly poor housing areas. One of the city's two most crime-ridden districts is basically this school's neighbor. Prostitutes and dealers can be found walking down several of the streets within miles of our house almost any night of the week. We pass them regularly, and I rarely think much of it. But... most of the people who are involved in these shady activities around the school are black. Maybe a few whites and a few more Latinos in the mix, but primarily black. They don't make me nervous, and I don't fear for my life.

But you take me out into White Trash Honkeyville, and I start getting agitated and frightened.

"Why?" she asked. "It's not like some drug-addled Bubba in a Jason hockey mask was going to bound out of a house and kill our children in a meth-crazed frenzy." -- I'm paraphrasing and exaggerating her words, but that was the general gist -- "so why are you nervous?"

"Because these people could be my relatives," I said.

I can't deny the implications of what I said at that moment. My words implied I get more upset about poverty and dilapidation when it affects whites, that it's all fine and good when minorities are plagued by problems like this, but I see white folks suffer, and all of a sudden I'm bothered.

After I'd had some time to consider the weight and implications of my claim, I realized there was another factor involved that explained my discomfort that had nothing to do with race. I am a downtown Chattanoogan and have been for more than a decade. Inner-city issues are something I see every day. I served on the board of a local homeless ministry here, so I saw it close up at times. The white poverty I saw on the fringes is something I haven't seen much in the last 13 years. I saw it in Warner Robins, but not since.

My Suck Creek Discomfort was more about me being a stranger in a strange land. I can't deny race playing a possible factor; I've had several handfuls of relatives who've dabbled in meth and/or lived in plenty of rundown trailer parks. But they're relatives I don't see much, and it's a lifestyle I neither see nor easily comprehend. Meanwhile, if you want to try and comprehend the life of the inner city, you can watch The Wire or Boys N Da Hood or any of dozens of movies, TV shows, or any of thousands of songs. The poor black life is constantly chronicled. Stereotyped, perhaps, but chronicled nonetheless. The white trash life isn't, and nobody much wants it to be. (And no, kiddies, Roseanne doesn't count.)

Maybe part of the new racial paradigm will require that we acknowledge the extent of the problem of white poverty, that we recognize drugs and gangs and ramshackle existences aren't just a black thing. Maybe that part of America is ignored because, for most of us, it's more frightening when it's all that much closer to home.

The Roger Alan Wade song is from All Likkered Up. Public Enemy's is from Apocalypse 91: The Enemy Strikes Black. Both can be found on iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site.

The Matter-of-Fact Media

Jimi Hendrix--"Changes (live)" (mp3)
Jr. Walker and the All-Stars--"What Does It Take (To Win Your Love For Me)" (mp3)

Oh, our wonderful media and their vaunted sense of "fair play!" How much I do appreciate that. In an effort to be balanced in their reporting, how they will print the most preposterous lie on one side as well as the quite reasonable rebuttal on the other! How they will publish both a fact and a denial as if both were equal combatants! Not an accusation and a denial, mind you, a fact--an irrefutable, well-documented, easily-researched, public record statement of truth! You'd think that would stand more than a bold-faced, take-my-chances, deny-deny-deny pervarication.

But you know what? I don't even care about that anymore. Let those games continue. I'll just make http://www.factcheck.org/ a "favorite" on my home page and see who's slinging it at the moment.

Although, here's food for thought from that great modern ethicist Karl Rove: he says that you really can't trust the fact-checker sites, because they have their own biases. Karl, they're checking facts. Either what the candidate said is true or it isn't.

Oh, we are in deep battle for the soul of the English language, and most of us, if not unarmed, are unwilling to enter the fray. That's just politics, we say. So be it.

But here's what I won't tolerate. How dare the "matter-of-fact" media treat racism and bigotry as a voting trend that merits the same bland statistical analysis that a category like "Working moms over 50" would get. "

Says Joe or Jane Media Talking Head: "Our studies show that working moms over fifty support Barack Obama slightly, 5-4, over John McCain, but in another category, people who refuse to vote for a black candidate, any black candidate, John McCain holds a substantial edge. This trend could be a real problem for Obama come Election Day."

Thanks for that insight.

What I want to know is why isn't this trend being pointed out as a real problem for America right now. Those media types looking for positives and progress will point out that we're not as racist as we used to be. Why can't we go for 100% non-racist America as the only benchmark we will tolerate? Why can't we acknowledge that we all have prejudices, but that we can't let those get in the way of human interactions?

And let's face it, the media crew we're talking about here is the same bunch who, every time an Arab was killed in Fallujah or Sadr City, he was referenced as a "suspected insurgent" or a "suspected Al-Queda member" or a "suspected Taliban fighter." Ok, so you want to put a label on those people (except, of course, when we kill a woman or a child or a village, then we have to call them "civilians"), that's your business, American media. I can't stop that.

But why not spread the labels around? Let's just say what those of us who live in Chattanooga already know, that some people, even Democrats, especially Democrats, aren't going to vote for Obama because they're racist. That's right, they're racist. Those of you who are thinking, 'But black people are only voting for Obama because he's black,' I'm going to punch you in the nose.

What we're talking about are people who, when polled, acknowledge that they agree with at least one of three negative descriptors for black people and that means they will not vote for Obama. That's right, whenever they think of every black person who has ever existed or will exist, they think a negative adjective will apply to all of those people. Even Stevie Wonder.

That's racist. That's disgusting. That's unAmerican, 2008. That's worthy of utter contempt from any thinking, living, breathing person on this planet. That's what the media, which hasn't ever "grown a pair," won't come out and say. And that's a fact.

Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsys live performances are available on Live At The Fillmore; Jr. Walker's classic is available on any number of compilations. Both are available at Itunes.

I'm Playing The Race Card

Colin Meloy--"We Both Go Down Together" (mp3)
The Monkees--"Take a Giant Step (Outside Your Mind)" (mp3)


I'm playing the "Race Card."

I'm playing it because right now, it's trumping everything else in the deck.

(Pssstt...anyone ever see Blazing Saddles?------>)

There's no way around it anymore, no matter how much we tiptoe. We are an incredibly, disgustingly racist country. How else can we interpret the following statistic from Maureen Dowd's Sunday column in the New York Times: "only 31 percent of white voters [told] The New York Times in a survey that they had a favorable opinion of Obama, compared with 83 percent of blacks?"

You're telling me that Barack Obama has a lower positive rating among white people than George W. Bush? Let's see somebody go ahead and try to spin that one. The man who started a needless war under false pretenses, leading to over 4,000 American deaths, tens or even hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, who destroyed the goodwill of the entire world, who supported torture and rendition, whose attorney general, personal counsel, and political advisor all resigned in hopes of avoiding scandal, who ignored the recommendations of the 9/11 commission and the Baker commission on Iraq, whose tax cuts and wars have given us the largest deficit in history when his predecessor left a balanced budget, whose economy is in the toilet--most of us whiteys like him better than we like Barack Obama?

Only 31% of white America sees Barack Obama positively?

Oh, my friends, we are staring at ourselves in the freshly-Windexed mirror this time, and the picture is not pretty. Somebody please go ahead and say right now, "Well, the black people are racist, too. Eighty-three per cent of them are only supporting Obama because they're black and he's black." There, that's out of the way. Bullshit, I say.

Our huge, diverse country, our opportunity-laden democratic homeland is no such thing. Instead, it remains a bitterly-stratified land, whose thin veneer of civility may allow us to get in and out of the Wal-Mart safely, when we have to rub elbows with "the others," but that does not allow us to fully embrace all of our fellow citizens equally.

I should have known when the calls started for making immigrants (translation: Mexicans) learn English; the freakin' Amish in Ohio have been speaking old German, and only old German, for well over 100 years. There are towns in Minnesota that fly the Swedish flag. There are Polish bakeries in Chicago where if you order in English, you are the only one doing so.

My dad tells me that they're already talking on TV about how if Obama doesn't win, "the blacks are going to riot in all the major cities." Now, my dad watches some weird stuff and sometimes confuses news and opinion, but I have no doubt he heard that.

Maybe the real America is still closer to the debutante ball I attended last weekend, where all of the attendees were privileged and white, the queen was a beautiful, blond rich girl and the king a wealthy downtown lawyer. On the wall behind their thrones hung a Confederate banner. The waiters at each table were black. The orchestra for the "program" was all white, but when it came time to get down and dirty with some real dancin' and drinkin', they brought out the black band, the black chicks, the Motown sound. I didn't stay to see the clean-up afterward, but I don't even have to guess who did it. But it was for a good cause, it raised a lot of money for an inner-city charity, so we all feel good about it.

I expected Obama's candidacy to shake some things up and to make us look at ourselves in some new ways. I even expected Obama to have to meet higher standards than his opponent; that goes with the territory of being the first minority or woman doing anything. Instead, I fear that instead of seeing ourselves in new ways, we are seeing ourselves for what we always were and that we still have the (invisible) chains in place. Only 31% of white Americans see Obama favorably? My God. I hope against hope.

Colin Meloy, of The Decemberists, released his first solo album in April, and "We Both Go Down Together" comes from that. "Take A Giant Step (Outside Your Mind) is classic Monkees. Both are available at Itunes.

Random Musings on Missing The 4th of July

Bottle Rockets--"Wave That Flag" (mp3)

1. It's been three weeks now, and I still haven't gotten over it. Missing the 4th of July means missing the peak of the summer. For me, there's a build-up there, then a long slow decline into the fall. Most years, there are vacations and good times that follow the 4th, but when you stand in the dark and watch those fireworks, there's a kind of invincibility against all things that takes hold, and the greatest feeling of invincibility of all is the feeling that the summer will never end. That's the 4th of July for me. When the 5th comes, that feeling is gone. And when I don't celebrate the 4th, as I didn't this year, the whole mental preparation for the flow of the summer is missing.

2. This sounds elitist, and I don't mean it to be, but if you are not born and raised in a country, it's got to be very, very difficult to get that country in your blood. In one way, life for an American is all of the events, large and small, that occur while you are part of the national experience--for me during those formative years, it ranges from the Pirates winning the 1960 World Series (0ne of my earliest memories is my dad watching the games) to the JFK assassination and the other '60's assassinations to all of the NASA emphasis culminating in the moon landing and Woodstock to the Moratorium when I was in high school and didn't understand why students were wearing black armbands and refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance to the rumors that Paul McCartney was really dead and deconstructing the songs in the high school cafeteria to the Steelers 4 Super Bowls and seeing Led Zeppelin in that same stadium to Watergate and knowing intuitively that there was something wrong with the man we were electing president. If you live outside America, you believe that the Dallas Cowboys are/were "America's Team." It reminds me of a live Graham Parker CD where he's talking about Russians before the fall of the Iron Curtain. Over there, he says, they think Billy Joel is a rock and roll singer. Ouch.

3. One of our last days in Korea, we noticed the Korean flag posted on streets everywhere. Tommy asked several people what they were for. "Oh, they're for Foundation Day," people would tell us, "It used to be a holiday, but the government cancelled it last year because they thought we had too many holidays." What? I repeat, what? A cancelled holiday? Who decides there are too many holidays? If you had to give up a holiday, which one would it be? Don't go for Arbor Day; that's too easy a target.

4. The 4th of July also means music. I always think first of lying on my back watching the fireworks at Engel Stadium and them playing Bruce Springsteen singing Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" with no understanding that it was written as a protest and it not really mattering. I have written in other posts of some of my 4th of July favorites, but over in Korea, it was that same Bruce Springsteen who seemed to capture America the best. As we sat in our "managed residence" high above Seoul, I played some songs that captured America for me. When it came my roommate's turn, he immediately chose a song by the great German band, the Scorpions. Now, I've got nothing against the Scorpions, in fact, they rock me like a hurricane, but it seemed to me support of my point #2.

5. I dig fireworks. Always have. In fact, growing up, dug firecrackers a whole lot more. A 4th of July that involved a brown paper sack of fireworks, enough to last the day, was a good day. We would start out as liberals, lighting entire strings of firecrackers at once; by the evening, we had becoming conservative, had unwound those strings and were lighting them one by one to last the night.

6. A thought on flags. It isn't a perfect analogy, I realize that, but imagine a person in South Korea who went around flying a North Korean flag or just had a bumper sticker with a North Korean flag on his car. It would be nothing less than treason. And yet, we have people who continue to celebrate the country that was never ours, the seceded South, by flying flags or putting on bumper stickers. The Bottle Rockets' song I've posted above is a brilliant examination of this situation, though from a racial perspective. I'm starting to look at it differently: if you fly the confederate flag, are you really celebrating the country that was never America?

7. Ex-patriates are sad people. You don't have to spend too much time around them to sense it. I'm not talking about someone who is just living in another country; I'm talking about someone who went for a little while not intending to stay and now finds him or herself a decade or more down the road and still there. Such people are especially bitter about the quirks and customs and behaviors of their host countries. At the same time, they are too far removed from their homelands to have much connection with those places. I suspect if they went back they would be equally bitter about the changes that have taken place back home since they lived there. I knew Thomas Wolfe was talking about a town, and I understood, but the sadness compounds when you realize how hard it is to go home again to a country that you left a long time ago.

8. And so, this year is the first 4th of July I have ever "missed," have not celebrated. The only thing I can equate it to was in 1969 when I was up at my grandparents' cottage on Podash Lake in Ontario, Canada for the first moon landing. My grandfather had brought up from Buffalo a small black and white TV so we could watch, but the picture was grainy, and it was hard to tell what was what. Even at the time, 12 years old, I remember think how odd that I was not in America for the culminating event of all my years of fascination with NASA. Alas, we cannot always be where we want to be. But next year.................

9. There was a second shooter on the grassy knoll.

"Wave That Flag" is from the Bottle Rockets first CD, available at Itunes and highly-recommended if you want to know what it was like when one of America's best rock bands first burst onto the scene.

Funny Bone Hairline Fracture

It Hurts When I Laugh - Love Spit Love (mp3)
You Don't Need to Laugh (To Be Happy) - Frankie Miller (mp3)
Paid to Smile - The Lemonheads (mp3)

I'm worried about the state of the American Funny Bone. It's not broken, but perhaps it's in need of some more calcium, stat. The American Funny Bone is like some 90-year-old woman's hips, and one good fall down a stair or two could shatter it into a bajillion pieces, leaving the American Sense of Humor stuck in a wheelchair for the short remainder of its miserable life, constantly bumping into the door frames and complaining about the crappy rest home cuisine.

Can someone please explain to me how, at a time when our society is almost as likely to get its news from "The Daily Show" as from some talking head on CNN or FoxNews, America risks losing its robust sense of humor, a sense that has arguably helped us almost survive numerous wars over the centuries, not to mention eight laugh-so-you-don't-cry years of King Dubya?

First, we get these scathing conservative responses to the Pixar movie WALL-E start sprouting up, accusing the movie of pissing on the Amur'kin Way of Life and mocking our culture of laziness and excess. (Disclaimer: I ain't seen the movie yet.)

And then this whole Obama v. New Yorker nonsense comes up, where apparently the racist morons who might not get the humor in the cover will now vote for McCain.

Excuse me, but just how many racist morons -- excuse me, racist morons who think Obama's a Muslim extremist terrorist -- were biting their nails, still unsure which way their vote was going? Hmm... should I vote for the American war hero or the neegra Muslim terr'ist? It's sooooo close! If only a cartoon magazine cover would offer me some guidance... 

I hate to pee in a big bowl of liberal corn flakes, but living in the South, I'm quite certain there's lots of folks who ain't voting for Obama either because they think he's Muslim, or they think he's a terrorist, or they think he's black. And really? When all is said and done? They mostly think he's a Muslim terrorist so they don't have to come out and say it's because he's black. (A black columnist for The Guardian UK makes some nice points.)

Further, how many racist morons even know where one can purchase New Yorker, much less use this cartoon -- it's a *#%&%# CARTOON, people!! -- in their nefarious propoganda. By that logic, if only Kim Jong-Il could plaster a few hundred thousand buildings with his visage, he could convince the American people he was actually a decent fella. Or maybe he would just need to sing "I'm So Ronery."

I have trouble envisioning the Ku Klux Klan using this cover as part of their recruiting materials. ("This one's guaranteed to double our membership!!") I don't see Republicans carrying large protest posters with this on them, like it was an aborted baby fetus, to their national convention.

But the talking heads are certainly right about one thing. This has hurt Obama's campaign. Even though he's personally tried to shake it off and act non-plussed about it, the reactions of everyone around him and media people and bloggers only serve to remind us that, if we vote Barack Obama for President, our sense of humor will take a serious blow.

Saturday Night Live won't even be allowed to spoof him, as every single spoof risks the overly sensitive taint of possible racism.

Back to the WALL-E issue. As numerous observers have rightly observed, observing our society as fat, lazy and wasteful isn't particularly original or groundbreaking. Nor, as they have noted, is it particularly inaccurate. But does that mean it can't be funny? Maybe not HaHa Funny, but maybe HurHuhmm Funny. Or maybe Oof!Ack!Ow! Funny.

Just how desperate are Republicans for some kind of grumpy upper hand that they're looking to a Pixar movie as proof of the vast left-wing conspiracy in Hollywood? Hell, Michael Moore practically looks like the captain, so I'm not sure Pixar could be skewed too far to the left.

More to the point with both of these examples, have we come so close to the fat bastards in WALL-E that we have to have our humor spoon-fed and spelled out for us? Are we so completely numbed and dumbed down that anything requiring more than a half-second of contemplation is tossed aside or feared? Would Jonathan Swift be bogged down as a barista at Starbucks, unable to sell his essays or novels because he can't write a good juicy tell-all memoir that involves Lilliputians?


"It Hurts When I Laugh" is on Trysome Eatone. "You Don't Need To Laugh (To Be Happy) is from Once In A Blue Moon. "Paid to Smile" is from The Lemonheads' Come On Feel... Amazingly, none of these songs are available on either iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site. Go figure.

Always BET On Black

WARNING: This week's songs contain naughty words and roughly 400 repetitions of the racially-charged "N" word. Listener discretion is advised.

I Don't Wanna Be Called Yo Niga - Public Enemy (mp3)
Dignity - The Heavy (mp3)
Blackjack - Everclear (mp3)

Few things are less wise than for a pasty white boy to dare get mixed up in opinionating on something like the Black Entertainment Network. The minute a pasty white boy throws his opinion out into the world, it can be sliced and diced, critiqued and lambasted, because it's as pure a Catch 22 as you can get. Fortunately, this pasty white boy's opinion only goes out to a small handful of people who already know better than to pay attention to his rants, so hopefully I'm in a relatively safe harbor.

If you didn't know, a number of corporations including GM and Pepsi have pulled their ads from BET's afternoon programs. Their action is the result of protests, chiefly from a group called Enough is Enough that is trying to fight the negative stereotyping of African-Americans in our media. There's more sex, booty-shakin' and gangsta threads in two hours of afternoon BET programming than there are holes in George Bush's logic.

Enough is Enough makes an admirable gesture made all the more admirable for their willingness to take on one of their own in the BET. Although Viacom-owned (read: overseen by rich honkeys), the folks at the top of the BET ladder are most decidedly black and have been the target of some scathing critiques, including Aaron McGruder, creator of The Boondocks (early part of the linked YouTube clip includes an example of this).

(Side Note: Aaron McGruder's sense of humor is so harsh it makes late-model Bloom County and Outland read like Family Circus. Boondocks can be so harsh, in fact, that it's often just not funny. But I admire the dude for channeling some serious and righteous fury into a cartoon.)

The damned if ya do or don't part of this is, BET isn't losing any of the advertising from these corporations. They're still paying BET exactly the same amounts as before, but their ads are now going to different time slots. Why the half-assed protest? Because the minute these big white corporations pull all their money from Black Entertainment Television -- no matter that they would claim it's in the interest of quashing stereotypes, no matter that a group of black activists are in full support -- they're opening themselves up to accusations of racism.

So BET isn't losing a penny in this, and they'll never have to face the level of scrutiny for their misdeeds that Don Imus in his goober cowboy hat will receive for his comments, in spite of the fact that, without question, the shit BET shovels is swallowed by more people and does far more damage than Imus ever could.

I can't even pretend to be in touch with my Inner Brotha. I learned more about race relations in high school from one CD -- Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet -- than I learned the previous 17 years of my life (OK, without Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, I'd never have known about Fear of a Black Planet, so I owe that movie a good bit as well).

Mine has been an existence of cultural cluelessness, although I've always hoped for the best and tried to minimize whatever racist tendencies I've witnessed in myself or those around me. I'm not one of the gajillions of stupid white people who starts any sentence with "I'm not a racist, but..." Those words always seem to preceed an extremely racist comment. How could it not? The entire reason for the existence of those five words is to grant the user carte blanche (or should I say "carte black"?) to utter inappropriate opinions or observations.

It's a shame The Cosby Show is so under-appreciated, as is Fat Albert, for that matter. Bill Cosby is proof, to me anyway, that even a philandering perv can have some seriously righteous causes and make positive cultural waves, often in spite of himself (see: Bill Clinton).

But Bill Cosby, Public Enemy, Spike Lee... these are influences long past, relics of previous iterations of race relations. Recently, it's either become easier to avoid these kinds of cultural awakenings, or they're just not as powerful as they used to be. I've never seen a Tyler Perry movie. I've purchased maybe two dozen R+B or HipHop albums in my entire life. Our culture will have a hard time exorcising BET's demons when so few of the other networks seem willing to step up to the plate and make a legitimate and compelling drama or sitcom revolving around black people. Is The Great Debaters really as powerful as Glory was 20 years ago?

To be fair, it's difficult to sound the alarms too loudly when our most bankable movie star is black, our most influential TV personality is black, our most esteemed athlete is black, and we're on the verge of electing our first black President. The existence of four supremely successful people doesn't magically erase racism from our culture, but it sure as hell buffers one's righteous fury, especially if you're a clueless pasty optimistic white boy.

One day, pasty white people and black people with a variety of melanin levels will have the ability to sit down together and calmly discuss misconceptions, ignorance, opinions, and observations without the dreaded fear that the discussion will end with the two sides feeling assaulted or more distant. I'll probably be dead by then, but I'll keep my eyes open just in case.  

"I Don't Wanna Be Called Yo Niga" is off Public Enemy's fourth album, Apocalypse 91... Public Enemy Strikes Black. "Dignity" is off The Heavy's only album thus far, Great Vengeance and Furious Fire. "Blackjack" is off Everclear's 2003 album, Slow Motion Daydream. All are available on iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site.