The Negro From Planet X

[chaunceydevegasays]

In many ways, the noted American public intellectual Cornel West has the first and last word on the emotional and psychic impact of September 11th on the (white) American public. When the planes were brought down on that day, and the national security surveillance state reached out to touch even white folks (in relatively minor ways) as compared to how it has historically treated people of color, West brilliantly observed that white Americans had been, for a moment, "niggerized". They were made to feel unsafe, insecure, vulnerable, and subject to random violence. White privilege works as a shield against such feelings as experienced by white Americans en masse. The lie that Whiteness is a type of existential innocence means that most white Americans are complicit in a type of historical and contemporary amnesia--what is a break in the chain of cause and effect--that makes it extremely difficult for them to understand how they could be disliked as a people and targeted for group violence. Al Qaeda's attack on the United States was not a motherless child. In many ways, the attacks on September 11, 2001 were a gut punch to the stomach of White American racial innocence.

[chaunceydevegasays]

The personal uncertainty and insecurity that so many white Americans felt and expressed post-September 11th terrorist attacks came as such a shock to the system…but not for African Americans. For African Americans, living with uncertainty is about living in the USA. Living with the reality that at any point and for any reason, we may be ‘mis-identified’ by the authorities, and jailed or killed; we may be targeted for extra-judicial harassment and killings; we may be humiliated by the authorities, yet obtain no apologies. We may be otherwise silenced.

http://zcomm.org/sendpress/eyJpZCI6NzMxMzk4LCJ2aWV3IjoiZW1haWwifQ/

[chaunceydevegasays]

Dayton, OH -- On August 5, 2014, 22-year-old John Crawford III was fatally shot by police in a Walmart in Beaver Creek, Ohio while leaning on a pellet gun from the store's shelves. Since his murder, Walmart has refused requests from family attorneys to publicly release security tape footage from the more than 200 cameras in the store. In response, ColorOfChange.org, the nation’s largest online civil rights organization, launched a petition demanding Walmart publicly release the surveillance videos to ensure justice for John Crawford, and help customers and workers feel safe in Walmart stores. Rashad Robinson, Executive Director of ColorOfChange.org, said, “Walmart thinks by hiding these tapes they can avoid a conversation about their responsibility for the safety of customers and workers in their stores: they're wrong. Walmart owes John Crawford's family, Walmart workers and future shoppers answers for why police stormed one of their stores and murdered one of their customers.” Robinson continued, “The 911 caller is now changing his story, saying that Crawford never aimed the gun at anyone in the store. Releasing the tapes publicly will help John Crawford's family, the community, and Walmart workers restore their faith in a legal process that too often refuses to deliver justice when Black people are hurt or killed. Ironically and tragically, Ohio is an open carry state; even if the pellet gun John Crawford picked up was a real gun, he would have committed no crime. Crawford’s death exemplifies how open carry laws provide no protection for Black people in a culture that doesn’t value our dignity or humanity.” “ColorOfChange supports the determined work of advocates on the ground, like the Ohio Student Association, who continue to demand justice for John Crawford. We demand full accountability of the police officers responsible. “ http://act.colorofchange.org/sign/ReleaseTheTapes/

White men can walk around in public with guns, i.e. their "freedom sticks" and only receive a stern talking to from the police--if at all. A black man leans on a pellet gun in Walmart and is executed by the police. The culture of cruelty and white supremacy deem black and brown people as disposable. 

Do sign the petition from ColorofChange to put some pressure on the greedy neoliberal gangster capitalist fiends at Walmart to release the video of the police murdering John Crawford.

[chaunceydevegasays]

White privilege makes too many white folks stupid. Their stupidity is not cultivated or grown by a lack of school resources, access to information, or some type of mental disability. The particular stupidity that is created by white privilege consists of a willful denial of the facts, facts and information which are readily available by listening to black and brown folks' life experiences, doing the minimum amount of research on America's (and the West's) history and present, or just shutting one's mouth and opening their ears when people of color say that events such as the recent murders and police abuse in Ferguson are not an outlier or revelation.

http://www.chaunceydevega.com/2014/09/semi-open-weekend-thread-what-sort-of.html

[chaunceydevegasays]

"Bring Khalil Home" courtesy of "Kokanee"—one of the friends of WARN

[chaunceydevegasays]

...the common denominator is always the gun. The Oregon shooter was even more obsessed with firearms than with religion. There will always be crazy, unbalanced people in this world with strange obsessions. The difference between the ones in other countries and the ones in America is simply the gun. We all play the same video games, we watch the same movies, we have the same neurology, we suffer from the same pathologies, and we worship (or don’t) similar gods. Without a mass killing device, a pathetic misogynist is just a pathetic misogynist. Without a mass killing device, an angry theocrat is just an angry theocrat, be it Christian or Muslim. Without a mass killing device, paranoid conspiracy theorists and trenchcoat-wearning kids are just disaffected outsiders. It’s not the motive. It’s never about the motive. It’s always about the gun.

[chaunceydevegasays]

So what? you may say: who cares what a lot of academics and bicoastal smartalecks think? You should care, because they’re completely altering the anti-gun narrative. For years, gun owners were characterized as a bunch of essentially harmless Fudds led astray by the evil NRA. Just educate them, it was said, and they’ll meekly hand over the guns. The new story line is that we are the hard core of an evil, oppressive racial group likely to strike out in any direction to preserve our undeserved privileges. We’re not a group that can be reasoned with, and thereís no point in trying to persuade us. We’re not misguided, we’re just bad people who are prone to murder and mayhem. That’s a whole different narrative, one that logically leads toward Auschwitz or Srebrenica or Rwanda. It’s not enough to stash an AR-15 and several cans of ammo and wear a Molon Labe T-shirt. If it gets to that point, it’s too late. Now is the time to make liberal use of the First Amendment to call out the latter-day Leonard Jeffries clones who are inciting hate against us. One civil war is enough.

I love the white victimology Gun Right. It is so hard out there for white men with guns. How do they manage with all the anti-white "racism" in the Age of Obama? I guess they are "patriots" arming to protect themselves against "genocide". 

[chaunceydevegasays]

But this is America, the NRA leadership’s version, where a man in this mental state was a gun seller and trader (remember how Timothy McVeigh was a gun seller at gun shows?), who got mad because he had—what else?—outstanding firearms charges against him. So yeah, why not kill the authorities and everyone else you can in a blaze of glory? We make it so easy, after all. In Las Vegas, two shooters, a man and a woman, entered a CiCi’s pizza—right across the street from a gun store, mind you—walked up to two metro cops and shot them at point-blank range, killing them and blathering about “starting a revolution.” They left a swastika and “Don’t Tread on Me” flag on one of the murdered cops’ bodies.

Gun nuts and the NRA. The NRA made this Frankenstein monster. Now they cannot control it. Mass gun violence is a sick and tired version of Groundhog Day. Nothing will change. White men, guns, money, and racism are a hell of a mix.

[chaunceydevegasays]

In my lifetime, I never would have imagined that I would see a Black President having his hand kissed by a white World War 2 veteran on the anniversary of D-Day. This is a necessary reminder that change just doesn't happen among the young; many times our elders do in fact lead us.

[bankuei]

And this comic summarizes everything I was saying with the analogy people who see someone getting beat down in the street and the first and only reaction they’ve got is to run up on the victim and demand acknowledgment, they, too, are not beating the person, instead of stopping the assault.

Because that’s basically what happens every time some kyriarchy, micro/macro aggression shit goes down and someone points out that it’s wrong or fucked up.

[misandryisactuallyreal-blog]

“ALL MEN ARE RAPISTS/ABUSERS/HITLER BECAUSE A MAN RAPED/ABUSED/COMMITED GENOCIDE!” -Stereotyping all men (why the #notallmen hashtag was created, because people said that shit.)

“Some driver ran me over” -Stating that some drivers are absolute dipshits who shouldn’t own a car, but not absolutely flipping 5 tons of shit and saying that ALL DRIVERS ARE HIT AND RUNNERS!.

[bankuei]

Not all men may be abusive fuckfaces who support women getting hurt, but pretty much ALL MEN whose first concern in the face of women actually getting hurt is braying about how it’s not all men instead of helping the harmed and stopping the harm,  ARE pretty much down with the violence.

[chaunceydevegasays]

I mention this, not just because of the day, but also because many of the indecent charlatans of our political class are making quite a meal out of e-mails that Bowe Bergdahl sent home to his parents in which he sounded disillusioned with America's mission in Afghanistan. Good god, is that where we're at now? A soldier's grousing is now a window into his "treason," which is presently being manufactured for domestic political consumption by a rabid exaltation of chickenhawks, and some military people who really ought to know better than to be used as cannon fodder by the ratfcking squad? I shudder to think what these mountebanks could have fashioned out of what the soldiers in the jungle who appeared in Michael Herr's Dispatches said about Vietnam. And, while the country grapples with subject of walking away from a war, I think it's time to read Tim O'Brien's classic Going After Cacciato again, if only for this passage, which speaks to our current situation: "In battle, in a war, a soldier sees only a tiny fragment of what is available to be seen. The soldier is not a photographic machine. He is not a camera. He registers, so to speak, only those few items that he is predisposed to register and not a single thing more. Do you understand this? So I am saying to you that after a battle each soldier will have different stories to tell, vastly different stories, and that when a was is ended it is as if there have been a million wars, or as many wars as there were soldiers." Making a political issue out of the doubts that he'd expressed about his mission in Afghanistan is part of a distasteful political effort to de-soldierize Bowe Bergdahl, to deprive him of a right that has been granted to ordinary soldiers since before Agamemnon sailed against Troy, to make out of him a character that does not fit into the phony America Fk Yeah! role that we have fashioned out of our "returning heroes," cheering them at ballgames and the like. But woe betide any of them who demand an audience for the one war they experienced if it runs contrary to that narrative, or if it can be coined into the cheap political currency of soulless ambition. This latter not only is no job for grown-ups. It is no fit job for human beings.

Some smart adult talk from one of the country's best writers on the Right-wing chicken hawk fascists who will use any tool or person available to delegitimate Barack Obama, the United States' first black president. The racism of the Republican Party extends to all matters foreign and domestic.

[chaunceydevegasays]

That is the best war reporting: the words and pictures that remind us that this is what we have done and this is what we are doing, and, if we choose to go to war again, these are the things we will do, to others and to ourselves. It’s almost impossible to read about Vietnam today and not think about Iraq and Afghanistan. And it’s nearly as impossible to think that if the people who had made the decisions to enter those wars had seen what Michael Herr had seen, or at least had read his relays of what he had seen, those wars might never have happened. Every word of “Hell Sucks,” starting with the title, is a warning. "We are not really a particularly brutal people, certainly no more brutal now than we’ve been in other wars, acquiring it as the war goes on," Herr writes. "But our machine is devastating. And versatile. It can do almost everything but stop."

[chaunceydevegasays]

When did Republicans and their White Right bigots become so obsessed with cosplaying? Tea Party thugs dress up like "The Founders". In Texas, Republicans welcome a Davy Crockett cosplay artist who calls for violence against Barack Obama. American politics is theater...again.

[chaunceydevegasays]

Although minor characters like Boba Fett figure heavily in the Star Wars expanded universe, perhaps it is no accident the bounty hunter has yet to receive a canonical story. By the 20th century, bounty hunting had come to be associated with Western genre films, from whose narrative conventions Star Wars liberally borrows, but the profession harkens back to the pre-American Civil War slave catchers in narratives like 12 Years a Slave, by Solomon Northup, and other personal accounts like those collected at The Library of Congress website. The prequel trilogy introduced the character’s father, Jango Fett, whom is believed to be named after the 1966 Sergio Corbucci film Django (which also inspired the 2012 film Django Unchained, also about a former slave turned bounty hunter). Boba Fett’s ship is also called the Slave I.

As someone who writes and thinks too much about race and popular culture even sometimes I have to throw up my hands and say, "No". 

[chaunceydevegasays]

I had never imagined that we would be so starkly confronted with the horrendous effects of these representations. I want to acknowledge that the press has turned Rodgers into a celebrity, while the families have been subject to constant reminders of the tragedy. I also grappled with how much to quote his manifesto, as I do below. I haven’t read the entire manifesto. I can’t. Since so many people on our campus haven’t been able to read it either, I thought making direct reference might demonstrate some things. I don’t want to contribute to his celebrity status here; I do believe that this shooting and his statements about his motivation teach us important things about the operationalization of things like the model minority myth or American masculinity and pathology. I offer a cultural critique to see what sense can be made of this tragedy and what sad sense this tragedy makes of critical theory and its continued relevance. For scholars and students of Asian American Studies, the case of Rodger makes three things clear. As I told my class, first, minorities can still be invested in whiteness... Socially, there are unearned benefits and advantages to those invested in whiteness, which often but does not always mean exclusively white people. This possessive investment in whiteness crosses racial lines. Other racial and ethnic groups can also invest in whiteness by supporting practices that uphold racial hierarchies. In this case, as we learned from the manifesto, Rodger was deeply invested in whiteness and sought to distance himself from men of color. He was a young Hapa man who felt not quite white enough... Second, Rodger’s own self-hatred demonstrates that his possessive investment in whiteness fueled his desire to transcend “second place” and to aspire to the top of the racial order as a white man by denying his own Asianness...

Imagine. You are a professor teaching a class on Asian-American identity race, and politics at UCSB and the abstract becomes real via Elliot Rodger. This is a powerful reminder of how intellectual work is political work with implication for the "real world". 

[chaunceydevegasays]

"As far as I remember, within the first 36 hours, you and other black people were saying that this was clearly a guy motivated by racism. Even before the evidence came out about the explicitly racist stuff in his manifesto. And a lot of white people responded with anger that black people were trying to inject race into everything. Not thinking that maybe black people would be better than whites at seeing the signs of it. And then I saw quotes from his manifesto that were clear signs of white supremacy going out on Twitter. I got some satisfaction posting that in your diary and elsewhere late that night. And then once white people could no longer actually deny that race was involved, because those quotes would be thrown in their face, it immediately switched to ignoring the issue of race outright. That makes no damn sense to me. But then, I don't freak out any time race and privilege are brought up. As apparently too many white folks still do."

Some witty pithy. Proof that not all comments made online are stupid and/or immediately worthy of the intellectual refuse pile and memory hole. 

[chaunceydevegasays]

This is the picture used by the NY Times in its piece about the mental health issues demonstrated by Elliot Rodger since he was a child. A white Asian who dyed his hair blonde to become fully white and to fit in with his peers. How many mentions of internalized racism--or even race more generally--in the Times' story? Zero. Journalistic malpractice from the nation's newspaper of record. White privilege and whiteness blind again...even on obvious matters.