“Jena is America,” says Alan Bean, speaking of the Louisiana town where six black students are looking at decades in jail for a schoolyard brawl while white kids are facing nothing for hanging up nooses. Jena is America in the sense that the unequal justice there is not unique. There are “Jena Sixes” behind bars in every state. But it isn’t America in the sense that the country as a whole has had no trouble at all ignoring Jena.
Bean is a Baptist minister from Texas who formed Friends of Justice in response to the now infamous Tulia drug sting of 1999 in which over half of Tulia’s black males were convicted on the uncorroborated word of a corrupt and racist undercover cop. He was instrumental in getting that story out. In January he got busy in Jena. By that time, a young white man had already been beaten up and six young black students had been indicted, originally on attempted murder charges. One of the six, Mychal Bell, was legally still a juvenile when he was convicted of attempted second-degree murder with a deadly shoe. While five of the six were have been bailed out, Bell’s been incarcerated ever since.
“If the media wasn’t watching what was going on then every last one of those kids would be in jail,” one of the Jena mothers, Tina Jones, told the Nation’s Gary Younge.
Jones is generous. The truth is, “the media” haven’t been watching. Black radio has been listening, and the black blogosphere’s been buzzing, but the white “mainstream” and the white liberal media woke up to this story about a minute ago.
August 2006: that’s when the story began, when a black high school student requested permission to sit under a whites-only schoolyard tree. The next day, three nooses showed up hanging there. The following week, black students staged a protest and Jena district attorney Reed Walters, warned them at a school assembly: “I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen.” That was after that same DA and school officials dismissed the noose incident as a “prank.” The December schoolyard fight took place after months of incidents in which the whites involved were charged with misdemeanors or not at all while the blacks drew various felony charges.
Bean says he started feeding stories to the Chicago Tribune, the BBC and the blogosphere back in April. “Some stories ran in May, but they didn’t catch. No magazines picked up. No nightly news. The New York Times studiously ignored it,” he says. With the notable exception of Jordan Flaherty at Left Turn Magazine, lawyer Bill Quigley and a few others the so-called “progressive” white press was just as AWOL as the “mainstream.” No turning point came until protests swelled in July. Democracy Now and ran special reports after Bell was convicted (a conviction that has since been overturned although he remains in jail.) The Nation first mentioned Jena in its pages in the October 8 issue, which hit the stands after a 20,000 strong national protest march. (A couple of mentions appeared online in September.)
By every account I’ve heard, the people who had sufficient fire in their belly to wake up before dawn and bus their way into Jena September 20 were African American — around 90 percent. Probably close to that same percentage had a story to tell about a family member or neighbor who’s been touched by the criminal injustice system. “White liberals care, but they just don’t feel it in anything like the same way,” says Bean. “There’s a massive experience gap.”
James Rucker of the action-alert network, Color of Change, sent out an email alert July 17 after hearing about the story from Bean and his online subscribers. On the media front, he thinks there’s good news and bad: “We’ve seen the power of black radio and the black netroots who really came into their own on this story, but it hasn’t captured the imagination of the left media in the way that I would have hoped.” (Subscribe to ColorofChange.org.)
We are, after all, talking about Louisiana. On August, 31, when the two hangman’s nooses were found hanging in the tree, journalists were all over the Gulf Coast marking the one-year anniversary of Katrina. In the following weeks, when residents started holding lonely rallies, regional papers in Alexandria, Shreveport and Baton Rouge carried word, as did Jena’s own Jena Times.
Is it too much to expect that following the burst of attention to institutional racism that accompanied the broken levee disaster and Katrina, white America’s sensors might have been unusually attuned to the sort of injustice revealed at Jena? Or even, to expect that journalists might have been on the look out?
The thing is, media, and the movement pressure it could have built, could have made a difference. If Jena High School and the Jena DA had felt pushed to take on the noose-hangers a year ago, one white student, Justin Barker, might never have been beaten by anyone and six young black men (and one boy) might be heading to college today, not to courtrooms. The whole Jena story could have been different if one District Attorney, not to mention the US justice Department had felt the push to do what would have been right — and kick Jim Crow out of the 21st Century.
It’s late but it’s not too late, for all of America to act. In fact, truly massive public attention is needed right now as a white backlash builds in Louisiana. While Air America and National Public Radio move on, David Duke on his radio listeners are all over the Jena story. Last week, the former Ku Klux Klan leader announced his support for Jena’s white residents (who voted overwhelmingly for him when he ran for Louisiana governor in 1991.) Since the civil rights demonstrators left, Jena familes are alone against the white supremacists who have started appearing. Over the weekend, a neo-Nazi Web site posted the names, addresses and phone numbers of some of the six black teenagers and their families and urged followers to find them and “drag them out of the house.” A white driver was arrested in a nearby town, driving a pick up with nooses tied to the back fender. White extremist web sites and blogs are exploding and it’s not just Klansmen and neo-Nazis posting hateful things.
It’s late but it’s not too late to answer: Is Jena America?
Laura Flanders is the host of RadioNation and the author of Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians, out now from The Penguin Press.
I can only imagine how many other incidences happened (roles reversed) before this one made the news. I’m sure plenty.
One thing we can do is to keep watching this story - and make sure the whole world is aware of it. Let all of the people witness this country’s regression to Jim Crow. Perhaps the Venezuelans can threaten a cut in the flow of oil to the USA if we persist in our racist ways.
Yes Laura, Jena is America. America isn’t America without Jena. That includes the entire spectrum of responses. Black people up in arms over an injustice, white msm buries it or ignores it outright, the left turns its face away, and Joe-Six Pack is told Don Imus got a raw deal.
NEVER NEVER forget…white people made lynching, e.g. hanging, burning, castrating, mangling, and eviscerating Black men and women into public entertainment for the kiddies, for mom & dad, and for gram and gramps. We packed a picnic basket and dressed in our Sunday best. This is an unrepentant, genocidal, Aryan slave Empire. No other description satisfies the evidence of our standard patterns of behavior.
The one saving grace in all of this consists of our massive decline as a portion of population in our little abattoir. We’re dying out as a people.
Laura, for about 35 yrs white women first got access to birth control and later, her right to terminate a pregnancy was upheld by the Supreme Court. At the same time, women were “allowed” to participate in the economic system ($0.73 for every $1.00 earned by a male).
In ‘67 we were 87% of the population. In 2000 we were 70%. By 2050, 46%-48%. Didn’t have enough gender slaves popping 14 babies before she died. Because of that we will be walking in an ocean of humans the color of the earth. This is US Census data.
White America will go out of its collective mind. We’ve already got 1/3 of the Black male population in our penal system and you already know how that penal system has changed since 1965 when we completed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation.
In ‘65 we had 640k humans in the penal system. 2/3 were White. You know the numbers now, 2.4 mil, 2/3 Black & Brown. We made them all criminals: Selective Enforcement, Targeted Incarceration, Disproportionate Sentencing. And the overwhelming majority work for Fortune 500 Corps for pocket money. Jobs that middle class people used to do.
Aryan Male Suprmacy, Human slavery, Gender slavery. These are the foundation for massive child abuse, constant war, and genocide. These are the foundations of the USA from Day 1, and I mean 1619.
These are more important to white Americans than having a middle class. These are more important to them than the Bill of Rights or the Constitution or Healthcare or Stable Jobs, or Education for their children. This is our his-tory. We never look in the mirror, the mirror breaks or we break it. Either way just shattered glass on the floor for ’somebody’ to clean up.
Jena is America. That’s why it’s going to Shatter.
lefty, you left nothing to expound on, great post.
No, that’s why it’s going to be FLUSHED.
As a Native American, my hand will be on the handle so fast you won’t have time to ask me where I live in Mexico.
Unfortunately Jena is as American as apple pie. DWB is not just a Jena expression, Driving While Black can be found in every community in America.
My wife and I are white. We have a black daughter. We hear people comment on this everywhere we go. To me we have a long way to go before we accept each other.
Thank heavens for immigrants as they try to fit in and in many cases accept the multi-ethnic/religious/background nature of the country better than the daughters of the American Revolution.
Check out this post from Davey D on the Jena6 situation.
Listen to audio here.
Does Jena represent America? Yes. So much for the great experiment.
Laura I am 100% against the double standard in the justice system, but I must protest your dishonest portrayal of a vicious attack of six on one, as a schoolyard brawl. We will never get anywhere if we keep allowing ourselves to distort the facts, in order to expose the evil of racisim
Imo, Jena is America.
Sooner or later… we all reap what we sow. It’s a bloody, crying shame that we all don’t learn/realize this fact of life early on. Perhaps then we’d all have compassion for each other? Perhaps then we’d see that we are all from one, that we’re all related, family, one human race? Perhaps…
I’m not a Christian. Still I think this bit from the bible sums it up accurately: Jesus wept.
——
luckylefty,
Thank you for your words. They leave me feeling impotent and sorrowful (for all of us), and that’s because I regard them as truth.
Will we ever learn?
More racist, anti-Euro/”white” crap in a lot of these posts. Yes, skin color does matter! And yes, every white baby is guilty of the Holocaust, or slavery, or Native American conquest, or fill-in-the-blank before he or she is even born! Hooray for the extinction of an entire group of people!
Goddamn, for a progressive website, there are sure a lot of cretins tripping over themselves to be as regressive as possible. Whether you’re a self-loathing twit like Luckylefty or a bitter old racist like Moonraven, hate is hate, even if some reactionary emotion in the most primitive part of your brain feels it’s right. Do you really believe you’ll have dandy utopia once all the evil blondes are dead? Profoundly, pathetically stupid.
As my english teacher says…or maybe he quoted it from somewhere else…
“Even if we all looked alike, we would still find some way to discriminate against each other. Different color hair or eyes, skin, last names, voice pitch, blinking. Anything that’s different from yourself.”
Stilba -
We do not despise white racists because they are white. We despise them because they are racists who applaud the imprisonment and even killing of others to satisfy their greed or need to see others put down.
Are you in this category?
As far as the MSM goes, I’m actually surprised that they didn’t jump on it right away. They love these kinds of divisive and explosive stories.
As far as the black media goes, I think the only reason it caught on there was because the injustice was of an interracial nature. Some white kids, rural and Southern, did something to some black kids and got away with it. The black kids retaliated and got nailed. If all involved were black or white, this wouldn’t have been a story anywhere.
“We do not despise white racists because they are white.”
Uh, I think a lot of people here just don’t like white people, or they just hate themselves. It’s all counterproductive at the very least. Just when people on the right use some bad thing that a black person(s) did to slander blacks, many people on the left seem to feel the need to do it when whites do something wrong to blacks.
Stilba-I really don’t know what to tell you. I’m offended by it also, and I think that it’s one of a number of things that push people away from the left, people who need to be on our side and who are being disenfranchised also.
I mean, how do we expect to get people on our side when there’s a perception that they are hated here?
I am a white male. How many people here hate me for that?
Moonraven seemingly wants to shoot me in the head.
Luckylefty wants to shoot me first then himself.
Kristina40-I’ve heard black men who were married to white women make disparaging remarks about women of their own race. I’ve heard black women who were married to white men go on and on about how rotten black men are.
I apologize for saying this, and I know that there are a bunch of people who will dying to flambe me for it, but I mean, don’t you feel that you come off as self-hating?
Luckylefty, a white person, goes on and on calling for some sort of self-induced genocide.
How is this healthy? Please tell me. How is self-flagellation healthy?
Even people in other countries who hate America’s foreign policy can separate the elites from the ordinary people.
Do you realize what a field day The Right has with this sort of thing? Do you all realize how this enflames already racist people?
Am I supposed to hate myself?
When the race war happens, IF it happens, and I hope it doesn’t, WHICH side should I fight on? The KKK hates me too, and I’m not fighting for them.
My white father is sitting in the next room. Will I be a hero to some of you if I go strangle him right now and then bite down on a cyanide capsule?
I think I’m just going to not post here anymore. Most people here have their hearts in the right place, but there’s also just way too much hateful nonsense to be found, and I no longer wish to be associated with it.
The Left will never break out of it’s small subculture status until it starts engaging people. You can’t engage the majority of Americans, when you constantly tell them that they’re all, whether they or not they know or admit it, and often by judging them solely on their skin color or gender, that they are all racist, sexist, homophobic, stupid, lazy, weak-minded, knowingly complicit in a vast conspiracy, and just plain rotten along with all their ancestors and every member of their families.
I’m tired of reading it. I can go onto a board full of right-wingers if I want to be insulted and alienated regularly, and that’s just for my views and economic status.
That’s what a lot of you guys do. You insult and alienate people. And I fail to see how that is conducive to positive social change. How is that not ugly?
I’m not walking away from Progress. I feel that I stand for the right things. And hate, no matter who it comes from is not one of them. If anything, it just doesn’t work.
Luckily the people are coming around to Progress despite what you all say. The polls are bearing that out.
Go ahead and stew. Don’t attack the KKK if you’re going to hate and make nasty blanket statements about entire groups of people. You’re only playing into their hands and the hands of the elites. And sometimes I think that’s what some of you want.
Bye. Go on and hate now. Hate, hate, hate. See where it gets you.
P.S. The Jena 6 should be freed. I want it to be known that I feel that they have been railroaded also. The hate among other things, distracts from the issues at hand, I was distracted by the hate I was witnessing in this thread and in other related ones.
Things will turn around for the Jena 6. All of a sudden they seem to be able to afford a little more justice.
iwarrior:
I too hate the circular firing squad and the reverse racism. I mean, how old does it get to have to repeatedly defend yourself against people you’re supporting, or hold up a hand and shout “hey, lay off of me, I’m on your side!”…?
Why is it if a white person admits this country was based on racial injustice from day one, they must be self hating? I don’t hate myself, I didn’t hate my Mother or Father who both happen to be white. That DOES NOT mean I have to be blind and act as if slavery didn’t happen, that Native Americans weren’t systematically slaughtered, Mexicans driven from their land etc. etc. etc. This country has a very POOR record of racial justice and pretending it didn’t happen and doesn’t still exist is counter-productive. If we are so progressive where were all the white progressives marching in Jena? They weren’t there, why is that?
IWarrior, what exactly is your point about black men and black women talking bad about each other? There are people with issues in every race. I’ve heard white men talk eighteen kinds of smack about white women when trying to get some (insert minority group here) ass. Are you trying to say that ONLY self hating people could possibly be in an interracial relationship? If so, you are horribly misguided and have your own issues. Honestly, the poor me, I’m a white male act is sad. You are the top of the food chain, this country is ruled by white males for all intents and purposes. How many female Senators have we had? How many female President’s? How many black Senators? Presidents? I thought so…
The real problem in the Jena case is that the facts, and the relationships between the facts are not clear, at least to me. I was not on the scene so I don’t know what happened really. It seems that the black kid is guilty and deserves to do about time served. The noose hangers should be charged with a hate crime. The school burners arson. etc. The real deal is money and control not race.
solrak
great link on Jena info.
genicon (and others)
What is missing from this story (and what you woudl have picked up had you been following it as has some of us in Australia) was that, certainly the attack by six on the white boy was bad, but the attacks by whites on black boys following the feelings stirred up by the noose incident only resulted in minor, if any, action.
That is the nub of the matter and is, as usual, getting lost because the prosecution of the Jena six is not being reported in its context. That is the real context of prejudice, not the bare fact of the black boys being charged.
Emmett Till’s mother and uncle (if they were still alive) would nod knowingly at what is happening. Just as they could have predicted that Emmett Till’s murderers would be acquitted because they, the murderers, were white and Till black, they woudl also probably have predicted convictions in Jena because those in the dock are black and the victims of the alleged crime were white.
QUOTING STILBA BELOW:
More racist, anti-Euro/”white” crap in a lot of these posts. Yes, skin color does matter! And yes, every white baby is guilty of the Holocaust, or slavery, or Native American conquest, or fill-in-the-blank before he or she is even born! Hooray for the extinction of an entire group of people!
———————-
MY REPONSE:
Right wingers are such babies. Whenever you try to talk about anything that makes them uncomfortable, they start crying like martyrs and setting up straw men to take down. “….every white baby is guilty of the Holocaust…” Only a Bill O’Reily type baby could be capable of such a stupid leap away from the discussion at hand.
Maybe that’s why we’re dying out Stilba, with cry babies like you and George Bush who can’t even handle a mildy disagreeing discussion, how the hell are we to thrive? We’re lucky we still have all the bombs and most of the guns.
Get life, Crybaby right winger.
Just like the move on outrage. I think it was a dumb ad, but the right wing response is so over the top—Oh, you’re hurting poor general Petraeus! As if our strong military need protecting from an AD. The general has been under gunfire, he’s a military man. He can take the criticism. His job is to defend the country and the constitution, WHOSE FIRST AMENDMENT IS FREE SPEECH.
Like I said, Right Wing Crybabies.
Pass on the meme.
I have a solution for all of you:
Indian, marry the white chick…
Black guy, marry the neocon chick
Skin-head, marry the redneck cop,
God, I forgot all about this racial tension in the U.S.
I’m interracially married and I got tired of communities in the south going bonkers over it, so I collected my wife, sold my house and left the country. Out here in Asia, nobody cares! It’s common. I see more and more mixed marriages here every day.
A noose in a tree is not a prank. It is torture. Mental torture. The message is clear.
We’ve been having trouble dealing with this since 1775, 1862, 1950’s….. and all times in between.
It is the curse of our very empire, the same as the british had with India. The best way to handle it it to intermarry. Then we’ll all be one color, one gene set, one culture.
Race dispute is one of the most destructive forces in our species; no wonder there won’t be consensus on CD on how it should or should not be spoken about. Race, Religion, and money have caused all the wars, throughout all of history.
You can eliminate religion by getting it back out of gov and keeping it to yourself.
You can fix the injustice of financial disparity by freezing all of Haliburtons and BushCo’s assets to pay for fines for participating in war crimes and pump it back to education.
You can solve racial dispute by declaring that interracial marriages will be tax free. (that would just kill the bubbas!)
My recommendations:
1. Instead of putting everyone in jail all the time (which is expensive,) do like the british did and ship your prisoners off to Botony Bay (or in our case drop em off in Iran or downtown Bagdad.) If they make it back alive, they’re going to have a whole new perspective on what racial hatred can turn into. We just don’t need these kind of people in a free society. The whole crowd, school administrators, local cops, the individuals involved on both sides need to be deported.
Part of the problem with our country is that these yokels have never even been out of the state. They believe that the whole world needs to be just like them. (a pre-civil war society.) What a shock it would for them to wake up in a culture with no holy rollers, country music or hillbilly beer! They wouldn’t last a week.
pacplyer
iwarrior, you wrote:
“Am I supposed to hate myself?”
No. You’re supposed to acknowledge, as I do, the actual his-tory of our ancestors, accept responsibility for the consequences of those actions on the lives of millions upon millions of humans, and then take corrective action to produce the economic and social justice those consequences scream for. Jena is just one flare that goes back to Nat Turner.
Part of that process is the recognition of the core drivers that have run this abattoir from day one. Abattoir means, “…place of forgetting”. I am calling on you to remember, and in remembering become Free.
In the post you refer to, you challenge NOTHING I wrote. NOTHING. Not one point of history. Not one point of social analysis. You said I made you feel bad. That’s not good enough. I want you to engage a Life or Death struggle inside over who you are as a human being. Armed with the facts, no matter how ugly those facts may be.
Here it is again: Masters, Overseers, Slaves. That social system is girded and founded on Aryan Male Supremacy, Human Slavery, and Gender Slavery. Masters are comprised of tightly knit families and klans connected by generations of intermarriage by selling their daughters and sons to each other and through business dealings over generations as well. You know many of their names already. When Joe Six-Pack got hisself a woman, he got a gender slave who was supposed to pop “his” children, e.g. free labor, until she died. A sterile wife got nullified and replaced. In this way every Joe Six-Pack got a chip in the Slave Master’s Economic System. Are you getting this? As a natural consequence you get massive child abuse (also installs free floating rage), constant war, and genocide. We have done and we do them all to this day.
By 1964 we had the greatest distribution of wealth ever seen in the history of the species. Full Stop. I was there, I saw it. I smelled it. This abundance was the direct result of the Roosevelt Legacy of taxation, corporate regulation, support for organized labor, and a social safety net. By 1964 the end of poverty in the US was in sight. Lifetime stable employment was on the horizon. Our Master Class was nearly moribund. They were disappearing as a segment of our population. All we had to do to fulfill the promise of a country without poverty, and a life of stable work was make a place for everyone at the table, and reject war and conquest as a way of life. This would have meant the Death of our Ruling Class as they are replaced as Rulers (behind closed doors) by greater levels of participation by the general population with the financial well being, physical health, and leisure time to be involved. Combined of course, with greater transparency in how we make decisions.
Does that sound like the America you got?
So yeah, white msm buries it or ignores it outright, and the left turns its face away – Because they are married to the MOB. You can turn away now but the words you have read hear will burn in your mind forever. Munch Munch.
Thank you Luckylefty for speaking the truth. You are one of the few that do acknowledge history. Pacplyer, good move finding your bliss elsewhere because racial harmony in America is a pipe dream. The crybabies who think that history has no bearing on the present, who feel that they are being *personally* persecuted by presenting and explaining history and missing the point in the process(do they have a guilty conscience in there somewhere?), are unfortunately the squeaky wheels that get the grease. And gods forbid a person of color actually has a complaint about his/her treatment in this country even to this day.. that’s a no-no.. playing the ‘race card’. Well white privelege is the ULTIMATE race card, at least in this country.. until people understand and internalize that things aren’t gonna change (much). We have to start equating white privelege with ‘affirmative action’ of the worst kind because it has supported this vicious kind of racial violence for hundreds of years now and people are beyond sick of it.
Iwarrior, I’m with you on this one. I, along with others, have been trying to point out that tarring whole sections of the population is counterproductive to the progressive community.
At various times on these boards I have seen blanket statements of hatred directed at whites, Christians, Jews, Southerners, “Red Staters”, Males, members of our armed forces, Europeans,business owners,- the list goes on and on. For my trouble I’ve been called every name in the book. Doesn’t bother me, just leaves me somewhat sad to realize that “intolerance” is not restricted to the right wing.
As far the Jena six is concerned. I think this is an injustice, with both sides deserving punishment. The black kids probably deserved to be expelled, as do the white kids, but jail is too much. I don’t agree, however, with the view that nothing has changed in the racial views of Americans.
To say that there is no longer ANY discrimination against blacks in this country would be being willfully blind to the discrimination that still exists. To say that NO progress has been made in racial equality in the last 50 years would require the same willfull blindness as regards the facts.
The U.S. still needs to progress on the question of racial equality for all of its citizens, the same as many other countries. (Cuba, for example. to look at the Cuban leadership you would think that blacks don’t exist in Cuba).
I hope we can keep moving forward, so that in a couple
generations we can all truly value all citizens for who they are, and not how they were born.
Best Regards
Between gde’s snotty “Are you in this catagory?” and hubcap’s calling me a “right-winger crybaby”, I can only shake my head. This is supposed to be a progressive website. That’s what I am, a liberal secular progressive, and that’s why I come here. But so many of the people here are banal, reactionary, smug and arrogant jerks who don’t even attempt to learn or listen to anything that isn’t in their own myopic gunsight. And they’re racists, even if they don’t think it counts when it’s being racist against people of Euro descent (or, as Moonraven once put it, it’s “justified”). Somebody please, please, please tell me how a toddler of that particular string of DNA is guilty of anything! Gde, you’re so smart, you tell me! How about you, Hubcap? Got a nasty name for that child?
What is hard to understand about racism being racism, no matter who it is against? Ok, some of you anti-whites are simple self-haters. Fine, dandy, enjoy that. Unfortunately, the stupidest are the loudest, and this is typical with a lot of so-called progressives. It’s why I have little hope for progressive leadership in the U.S. Look at what we have to work with! Regressive hyperboles like Luckylefty trying to tell me I am guilty of gender slavery. Regressives like those tools hubcap and gde, so sure they’ve got it all figured out before they’ve even heard what I’ve said. Why is some racism ok? Somebody please tell me.
Stilba, how has racism affected your life? Have you lost a job because of it? Been denied a job as a result of it? Been denied living quarters because of it? Treated as a criminal because of it by law enforcement? How many of your ancestors died because of it? How many of your family members are in prison because of it? GET THE POINT?
Kristina40, what you are saying is obvious and true. Our society is full of racism. In other threads, I’ve gone on and on about the nasty subtle racism of the Midwest. In every human society, some groups have an easier time advancing than others. We all know that. It’s shameful and evil. But who is to blame? Every single “white” person? White babies before they’re born, like original sin? That’s my point. One of the above posters said I was guilty of genocide in another thread. I’m a young guy - what have I personally done to call for that? Kristina40, I agree with you! Every point you make is correct, and should be elementary to any Yankee with a pulse. Our society is a mess in this regard, but when we start talking in detail, we need to be more careful. We can’t say “because whites have easier upward mobility, every white is an oppressor.” That’s both inaccurate and racist. A handful of stupid white men still control almost everything, but I am not one of them. Or does my skin determine that I am?
If you want to talk ancestors, we can talk about the Mediterranean peoples who thought it just fine to displace, conquer, and Christianize north Europeans for centuries. It’s still accepted to use their racist term “dumb blonde.” How far back shall we go? Am I guilty of wiping out the Neanderthals, too?
When you talk about race in this country, the hyperbole and excitement makes it impossible to have a rational, reasonable conversation. Dare not question anything! Again, I shake my head at the myopia that seems to have to pass for progressive thought.
As usual, because this is a thread about COLOR, the white racists shills, Stilba and iwarrior are on here accusing anyone who admits to being culturally or otherwise non-white of being hate mongers.
I defend their right to free speech, but respectfully suggest that they go fuck themselves.
They still have not told us how much they are paid for their posts.
I find it hard to believe they would post that shit for free.
Sigh. More bitter, misunderstanding-filled hyperbole from moonraven.
More facts, racist shill.
Just the facts.
Go cry someplace else. I do not give a shit about your denial.