Beautiful Horizons

Luis Suarez

There is little question that race is a complicated issue in Latin America and there is little question that racism is a problem in football (aka soccer). I do not know the specifics of the accusations against Luis Suarez, the Uruguayan forward for Liverpool. I have heard rumours such as that he called Patrice Evra "negrito", which is a common expression in Uruguay and elsewhere in Latin America.

I have also read that this provides much of the basis for Suarez's defense: that this is not an insult and the issue speaks more to cultural differences than racism. I find this explanation alternately understandable and perplexing. Several years ago, I was having lunch with some friends at their apartment in Brasilia. They are attorneys who are politically center-left, who came from humble beginnings and, I believe like many Brazilians who can trace their lineage many generations back in Brazil, very likely have Afro-Brazilian ancestors.

Yet they called their housekeeper/cook "Neguinha," i.e., "Blackie." They explained that this was common. I was tempted to ask them how many whites were called "Branquelo", i.e., "Whitey" by Afro-Brazilians.

This is one place where Suarez's argument falls apart for me. I have no data to back this up, but I would find it difficult to believe that there are lots of Afro-Uruguayans who refer to whites they know as "Blanquito."

But beyond that, I find this argument compelling:

Also, people are making out that Suarez has an ignorance of how one is supposed to behave in Northern Europe, like he's just come off the boat or something. He hasn't — he spent five years in Holland (which, the last time I looked, is pretty well developed), including a season playing alongside Edgar Davids at Ajax.

Would he speak to Davids that way? Or Clarence Seedorf? Or any black Dutch player? I doubt it somehow, particularly given how annoyed a lot of Holland's black players have been in the past about perceived racial bias, let alone overt comments.

I do not know what Luis Suarez's intent was, if any. I have no interest in getting inside his head. I just wish that this was not an issue for this sport - or for the world.

Various ways to spell "the N-word."

Angry Black Lady deconstructs the small government conservatives who are concerned about the size of the deficit and watch FOX News for fair and balanced reporting on President Obama.  (No racism over there - just keep moving right along.)  

Via Balloon Juice.

RIP James Jackson Kilpatrick

Famously parodied by Dan Akroyd ("Shana, your ignorant slut!") on SNL, Kilpatrick was a Southern newspaper man, columnist and half of a running argument on 60 Minutes in the '70s. Historian Thomas Sugrue dissects the neo-Confederate Kilpatrick's role in planting the racist roots of a contemporary conservatism steeped in reactionary resentments, HERE.  

Update: Washington Post obit that documents the ugliness that pervaded Kilpatrick's career, here:

 "Before there was a Bill Buckley, before there was a Ronald Reagan or Rush Limbaugh, there was James Jackson Kilpatrick explaining public-policy issues from a conservative perspective," said Richard Viguerie, a conservative youth group leader in the early 1960s who became a direct-mail pioneer for conservative political candidates...

In books, essays and editorials, he was known for clothing segregationist doctrine in the terms of constitutional argument...

One of Mr. Kilpatrick's most strident essays on civil rights, "The Hell He Is Equal," was scheduled for publication in the Saturday Evening Post in late 1963. But editors pulled the essay because of the Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that September, which claimed the lives of four black girls during services at the church, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote in "The Race Beat" (2006), their Pulitzer Prize-winning book about journalism in the civil rights era.

"Kilpatrick, by propagating a whole vernacular to serve the culture of massive resistance -- interposition, nullification, states' rights, state sovereignty -- provided an intellectual shield for nearly every racist action and reaction in the coming years," Roberts and Klibanoff wrote.

An erudite or "constitutionalist" veneer for tribalist resentments and reaction is, of course,  too familiar, as are the more "populist" expressions. This core of "modern conservatism" apparently gained new life on January 20, 2009.  The Teabaggers are embodiments of "Kilpatrickism" without his extensive vocabulary. (And what the hell was The Saturday Evening Post doing publishing overtly racist screeds - bottom-feeding at the level of the Ku Klux Klan - in 1963, the year of the March on Washington. It's easy to forget how recently the most blatant racism, with no holds barred, was considered rational discourse. Now we get it with packaging.)

Southern Baptists shouldn't build churches in neighborhoods where decent people live.

I'm not saying that they don't have a right to under the First Amendment, but their churches make me uncomfortable.  What about my "right" to not being subjected to the "triumphalism" of religious extremists who hate my values.  The Southern Baptist's churches are an affront to the equal rights and freedoms that  America stands for. 

As example, this morning on my TeeVee a Southern Baptist minister was arguing that Muslims shouldn't build mosques in the United States - anywhere - because of the 9/11 attacks and various other crimes committed in the name of Islam by extremist Muslim fundamentalists. He stated that these crimes are what Islam stands for throughout its history.  His argument reminded me of the ugliness and hate that Southern Baptists have preached throughout their own history.

The Southern Baptist Convention was born of a single issue: human slavery.  Southern Baptists were for it. When northern Baptists began to criticize the institution as inhuman and anti-Christian in the decades prior to the Civil War, the Southern Baptists broke off relations and instituted their new denomination on the basis of a defense of human slavery. 

Their Biblical expositions of Negro inferiority were based on Noah's curse of slavery upon Canaan, son of Ham, who was presumed to be the ancestor of the Black race; and also based on the patriarchal and Mosaic acceptance of slavery, and, also based on the New Testament commands of Peter and Paul regarding slave-master relationships. Rev. Furman (a leading Southern Baptist spokesman) stated, "For though they are slaves, they are also men; and are with ourselves accountable creatures; having immortal souls, and being destined to future eternal reward." The Southern Baptist view was that slaves were better off under the loving, tender, compassionate care of Christian slaveowners, and the institution of slavery was to be "a blessing both to master and slave." *

Throughout the civil rights era, Southern Baptists defended racism and segragation on Biblical grounds. For most of the life of their sect, they have represented racism, slavery and segregation as essential to their Biblical beliefs. The church is rooted in the doctrine of "Biblical inerrancy", aka "literalist fundamentalism", so eventual disavowals of their foundational history  (which came late in the 20th Century when overt racism was, finally, becoming untenable in polite circles) obviously involve a bit of interpretive contortionism and raise questions about the very notion of their  belief in"inerrancy."  While there have been "official" disavowals of their racist past - which was their ONLY rationale for existence as a separate denomination - can we trust them?   For more recently the Southen Baptist Convention has affirmed another to0-familiar invocation of inequality and servitude, wrapped in denials of a clear intent.

On June 10, 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention, for the first time, amended the 1963 Southern Baptist statement of faith known as the Baptist Faith And Message, adding a brand new section (XVIII) entitled the “Family Amendment” that states in part, “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him [spiritually], has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation [in the societal realm].”  Of course, Southern Baptists believe their amendment concerning the necessity of wifely “submission” and the wife’s duty to “respect, serve and help” her husband, is what the Holy Scriptures demand. But Southern Baptist slaveowners once believed the same thing regarding the “submission” of slaves and the slave’s duty to “respect, serve and help” their masters.*

So there you have it.  A church steeped in bigotry and discriminatory beliefs based on extreme fundamentalism. And if any in the church object ?

Southern Baptist seminary professors were forced to sign a pledge of acceptance of the Family Amendment, or be fired. And denominational leaders were given the green light by their agencies to brand dissenters as heretics. Dr. Richard Land, President of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, and drafter of the Amendment, has written that those who do not support the Family Amendment are either "goddesses of radical feminism," "gurus of political correctness," "defenders of the subjective, secular Church of Sociology and Political Correctness," or have succumbed to the "trendy egalitarian rhetoric of the late 20th century." [November/December 1999 issue of Light (official magazine of the SBC Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission) entitled, "Questioning Biblical Submission: Religious Critics Renew Debate."] Similar ridicule was heaped on Black Baptist ministers mere decades ago for refusing to attend the then segregated Southern Baptist Convention meetings and who insisted on the full equality of Blacks. Back then the pro-segregation Southern Baptist Convention leaders ridiculed the Black ministers, calling them "unchristian" in their objections, and unduly influenced "by what are essentially Russian Communistic theories."

Let’s review. Southern Baptists favored slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and fought against women's suffrage, federal lynching laws, desegregation and civil rights. Now they call for women to submit to their husbands regardless of the talents, abilities or calling of the parties… *

So, Southern Baptists, please don't build your churches near me or my family. I say it in the spirit of ridicule, satire and irony...they have First Amendment protections to spread their aggressive ignorance and bigotry. And I suppose we should accept at face value their expressions of remorse at using "Christianity" to rationalize the crimes of slavery and segregation. But honest to God, I really don't want these creeps like the raving preacher I encountered over my morning coffee - with their "inerrant" track record of extremism, prejudice and bigotry - anywhere near me, not even on my TeeVee.  The irony, of course - and it's a rather pathetic irony - is that this character (his name thankfully escapes me) was fulfilling the perfect stereotype of the "Christian crusader" as an enemy of all Muslims of every stripe, everywhere,  drawn to the specifications of the bin Ladenist  cohort of extremist Islamic  fundamentalism.

(* Block quotes are borrowed -  freely and extensively - from Duke University professor Edward T. Babinski's "Southern Baptist History 101.")

Tea party racist ? According to...uh...Tea Party spokesman, yes indeed!

The NAACP has accused the Tea Partiers of harboring racist elements rather than isolating and repudiating them. It did not condemn the organizations, merely asking that they separate themselves from expressions of racism in their ranks. In response a key Tea Party spokesman rendered the NAACP's judgement questionable.  Contrary to the NAACP's rather mild resolution, the Tea Party movement appears to be led by racists and openly inclusive of their pathologies, rather than merely "too little, too late" in distancing itself from racism in its ranks. After denouncing the NAACP as "making more money off of racism than any slave trader",  here's "Tea Party Express" spokesman Mark William's characterization of the organization, it's director Ben Jealous, and its constituents in the form of a "Letter to Abraham Lincoln" -

How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn?  Totally racist!  The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society? Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever.  We had a great gig.  Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house.  Please repeal the 13^th and 14^th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Sincerely Precious Ben Jealous, Tom's Nephew  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Head Colored Person

Nothing racist there...nothing to see - move right along.

(Via TPM)

No racial profiling in Arizona

After passage of a law requiring suspicious types to prove their citizenship to local police and another putting an end to ethnic studies programs, Arizona goes into the "you can't make this stuff up" zone.  From the Arizona Republic:

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.

The project's leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children's ethnicity. But the school's principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.

The "Go on Green" mural, which covers two walls outside Miller Valley Elementary School, was designed to advertise a campaign for environmentally friendly transportation. It features portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure.

R.E. Wall, director of Prescott's Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town's most prominent intersections.

"We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars," Wall said. "We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics)."

Wall said school Principal Jeff Lane pressed him to make the children's faces appear happier and brighter.

"It is being lightened because of the controversy," Wall said, adding that "they want it to look like the children are coming into light."

Lane said that he received only three complaints about the mural and that his request for a touch-up had nothing to do with political pressure. "We asked them to fix the shading on the children's faces," he said. "We were looking at it from an artistic view. Nothing at all to do with race."

City Councilman Steve Blair spearheaded a public campaign on his talk show at Prescott radio station KYCA-AM (1490) to remove the mural.

In a broadcast last month, according to the Daily Courier in Prescott, Blair mistakenly complained that the most prominent child in the painting is African-American, saying: "To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?"...

Faces in the mural were drawn from photographs of children enrolled at Miller Valley, a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott. Wall said thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project, the fourth in a series of community murals painted by a group of artists known as the "Mural Mice."

The public art, funded by a $5,000 state grant through the Prescott Alternative Transportation Center, was selected by school students and faculty.

"The parents and children love it," Lane said.

Idiocy

Mercia and I were planning a trip to see several of the National Parks in Arizona next year, but considering this idiotic law in Arizona, I have to reconsider. It's not merely because of the odious nature of the law, but my wife is a naturalized US citizen who is Latina and speaks English with an accent. If I wanted her to be subjected to a police state, I'd like to think I wouldn't have to do so in my own country and I'd like to think my own country was not becoming Apartheid-Era South Africa.

Don't take my word for it.

Confederate History Month

Only 25 days left...

A Sensible View From the Right

Greg Weeks tips me to this article in The American Conservative. Unlike much of the hysteria from the right, his comments are sensible, fact-based with extensive documentation and worth a read. As Greg notes, here's the major takeaway from the article:

The evidence presented here powerfully refutes the widespread popular belief that America’s Hispanics have high crime rates. Instead, their criminality seems to fall near the center of the white national distribution, being somewhat higher than white New Englanders but somewhat lower than white Southerners. Taken as a whole, the mass of statistical evidence constitutes strong support for the “null hypothesis,” namely that Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age.

This part resonated with me:

Prior to moving back to my native California, I lived for five years in Jackson Heights, Queens, one of the most heavily immigrant and ethnically diverse parts of New York City. There as well, white Europeans were a small minority and immigrants from various Latin American countries were the largest ethnic group, close to an absolute majority of the local population. On a typical afternoon or evening, probably 80 percent of the people walking the streets of my neighborhood were non-white, and on dozens of occasions I returned home from Manhattan on a late-night train, the only white face in the subway car. Yet in all my years of living there, I never encountered a hostile or menacing situation, let alone suffered an actual criminal attack. Hardly what one would expect from television images, let alone the wild claims made by conservative magazines or talk radio.

I have lived in Jackson Heights for nearly nine years and in my experience it is the safest place in which I have lived in New York. I urge you to read the article. While there are probably many things I wouldn't agree with Unz about, I do respect the care and intelligence with which he wrote the article.

The City of Brotherly Love?

I don't think so . . .

Thank goodness there is a happy ending.