Category Archives: Racism

February 13th, 2013: Slavery Finally Banned In Mississippi

No, that is not a typo.  It turns out that, due to an oversight, Mississippi has never actually ratified the 13th Amendment banning slavery.  Better late than never?

I find it very hard to believe that this was an actual oversight, but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.  Still, Mississippi didn’t actually vote for ratification until 1995.  1995!  How is that even possible?  I wonder if each year until 1995 there was someone that said, “Maybe we should finally ban slavery?”  And the overwhelming response was, “Dude, too soon!  Too soon!  Our wounds are still healing!”

More proof of a post-racial America.

Still Classy, Virginia

When last we left Virginia, the Republicans were passing a redistricting bill under cover of Presidential inauguration.  Looks like that was just step one of their plan to disenfranchise voters who are not white males.

The party of John Calhoun‘s (Ta-Nehisi Coates link!) next step is to make sure someone like President Obama can never be elected in Virginia again.  You see, Obama had the gall of winning Virginia twice.  He did this by winning the popular vote in Virginia.  And that just won’t do.  No sir, not at all.  Now that they have gerrymandered the district boundaries to all but guarantee a Republican majority, they need to guarantee a Republican president too.  To do this, they plan on splitting their electoral votes by whoever wins the district instead of a winner-takes-all electoral system.  Ta da!  Virginia now will give more electoral votes to a Republican instead of a Democrat even though the Democrat had a lot more votes.  As Ta-Nehisi Coates says,  “If the GOP can’t convince enough people to win, it will rig the rules so that certain people matter less than others.”

And by “certain people”, we, of course, mean non-whites.  More Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Efforts to disenfranchise black people, have always been most successful when they worked indirectly. After the initial post-war Black Codes were repealed, white supremacists turned to less obvious modes of discrimination — poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests.
These were cloaked under a colorblind argument — “We don’t discriminate against black people, we discriminate against people who can’t read the Constitution.” By “read the Constitution,” they meant “recite the Bill of Rights by heart.” And they’d ask you to do this after reducing your school funding to a pittance. I say this to point that this is not a “new” racism. This is how it scheme went before the civil-rights movement, and this is how the scheme works today.
To see the only other major political party in the country effectively giving up on convincing voters, and instead embarking on a strategy of disenfranchisement is bad sign for American democracy. There is nothing gleeful in this.

Nothing gleeful, indeed.

South Carolina kneels and kisses the hand of the new master.

Top Ten Racist Stories Of 2012

The Chicago Defender has a list of the most jaw droppingly racist stories of 2012.

These aren’t blatant racist stories.  These are the ones that you have to scratch your head and wonder what the people were thinking.  My favorite is the man from Wisconsin who claims to be an Obama supporter and yet posts a sign with a gallows on it that says, “Hang in there Obama”.  “Hang” and “Obama”, though, are in large print and “in there” is much smaller.  So to anyone driving by, it says, “Hang Obama”.  I also somehow missed Gabby Douglas winning of the gold quickly followed by an NBC Olympics commercial of a monkey winning gold.

Don’t you just love a good top ten list?  Ugh.

Who Wants To Reduce Gun Homicides?

Do you want to reduce gun homicides?  Sure, we all do!  There are some really easy steps we can make to accomplish this.

First and foremost among these steps would be to repeal drug laws.

Oh, you mean THOSE gun homicides!  Those mostly affect people who are not nearly as white as me.  Can we get back to talking about preventing white people from getting killed by guns?

Dripping sarcasm aside, repealing drug laws and regulating and taxing their sale would solve a whole lot of our social ills.  Not only will it likely drastically lower the homicide rate, it will also raise governmental income while reducing incredibly costly governmental spending on drug interdiction.

I don’t mean to make this sound like a panacea for all our problems.  Drug addiction is a serious issue.  Repealing some drug laws will likely lead to an immediate increase in drug addiction cases in the short term.  But if that is the price we pay for saving lives, it seems worth it for me.

Using drugs is an individual choice. (I don’t actually believe this in most cases, but it’s a belief popularly held by most people.)  The taking of a life is an act that removes individual choice.  By repealing drug laws we would be reducing the instances of forced removal of choice by increasing the freedom of choice.

Paranoia Runs Deep

Continuing with my “Grown Men Playing Dungeons and Dragons” theme, there is another strange psychology at play here in the United States.  That is the belief of just about every group, no matter how large, that they are an oppressed minority.

Many Christians think they are an oppressed minority.  Here’s future Senator of South Carolina Tim Scott talking about how Christians are the most oppressed group in the country:

 

I have news for you, Christians who think you are being oppressed, being prevented from pushing your views onto others through government is not oppression.  Yes, you’ve gotten away with it for many years without much blowback.  That’s normal when a vast majority controls just about everything.  What you’re seeing is not you being oppressed.  It’s minorities finally sticking up for their rights to not be bullied through government.  You are simply finally not being allowed to get away with things that have been always been unconstitutional.  You still control every branch of government in every state.  You still outnumber every other religious denomination by a very large margin.  So quit acting like the spoiled kid that always got his way until someone finally confronted him about his behavior.

The next vastly oppressed minority is men.  That’s right, men.  Who are we being oppressed by?  Women, apparently.  Not just any women, though.  Feminists!  I won’t link to any of the websites, but look up Men’s Rights Activists if you’re interested in mucking through some real slime.  Seriously, it’s some of the most vile crap you will find on the interwebs.  On the plus side, their web sites make for great logical fallacy bingo games.

Another incredibly oppressed minority in the United States is white men.  I know this because Mitt Romney lost the presidential election:

 

Poor white men.  They only control 82% of the Senate and a similar amount in the House while only representing 33% of the population.  It’s so difficult to be a white male these days!

All of the above scenarios are really about not recognizing privilege.  Christians have it.  Males are up to their heads in it.  White males are swimming in an ocean of it.  The oppression these groups feel is merely their privilege taken away from them.  Slowly, but surely, the level of privilege in this country is being evened.  We have a long way to go, but like the wind eroding a mountain, our progress can not be stopped.

For You Racists Who Think All Dwarves Look Alike

In anticipation of the deluge of dwarves in the new “The Hobbit” movie, The Lord of the Rings Project has released a handy flowchart to identify each of the main dwarven characters.  And yes, you do want to check out the rest of their site.

I’ll definitely be seeing “The Hobbit” this weekend.  I’ve heard nothing but great things about it from various Tolkein fetishist friends.  I will say that the way some of the dwarves look almost human and how others look so cartoonish was a little off-putting in the trailers.  I hope it doesn’t distract in the actual movie.

Voter ID = Voter Suppression

Ever since voter ID laws became the latest craze with Republican voters, there has been a steady trickle of prominent Republican politicians who have let slip the real (and obvious) reason for voter ID laws: To allow Republicans to win seats that they normally wouldn’t be able to win.

First it was Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai claiming that voter ID laws will provide a path to victory in the state for Mitt Romney.  Now it’s two Florida Republicans.  Former Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer says that it’s state voter ID law was specifically meant to suppress Black and Latino turnout and former governor Charlie Crist echoed that voter ID only suppresses voter turnout though he doesn’t specify that it is targeted mainly at minorities.

We’ll leave aside the implicit racism of voter ID laws for now because all you get from that is a chorus of “I’m not racist!  Some of my best friends are of an oppressed minority!”  I will say this, though: If you consistently favor laws that happen to disproportionately disfavor minorities, you need to do some deep introspection because you both walk like a duck and talk like a duck so you shouldn’t get upset if people mistake you for a duck.

On the almost certain chance that you don’t think you’re racist and that in-person voter fraud is totally a thing and that it decides elections, I say learn statistics.  It is statistically impossible to win an election by in-person voter fraud.  Please note that “statistically impossible” doesn’t mean impossible, it just means that an improbable series of events would have to occur in order for in-person voter fraud to decide the election.

First, the election would have to be close.  Unless you are off-the-wall crazy and believe that organized in-person voter fraud is capable of producing more than a handful of votes here and a handful of votes there, you have to conclude that, right off the bat, 95-99% of all election decisions in any given year simply cannot be decided by in-person voter fraud.

Second, if the election is close, there is a far greater chance that the election will be decided by a counting error.  Neither machines nor people can count ballots with 100% accuracy.  Statistical models show that final tallies normally have a margin of error of between 1.8% and 2.0%.  That’s right, a close election that, by law, calls for a recount would be much better served by a flip of the coin than by a recount and would also save tax payers tons of money.

Third, “but what about the smaller local elections”, you ask?  Yes, the smaller the election, the greater the chance of fraud, but that fraud isn’t going to come from in-person fraud, it’s going to come from collusion.  You see, the smaller the election, the harder it would be to commit in-person voter fraud because it becomes much more likely you are going to be identified by poll workers as a stranger in a town where everyone knows each other.  So the only way to safely get away with it is to collude with the poll workers and voter ID laws aren’t going to stop that.

Voter ID laws are and always have been about voter suppression.  At best, they solve a non-existent problem.  At worst, they’re reminiscent of the Jim Crow era poll taxes. Please stop supporting them.

How segregated is your city?

This Flickr site would be pretty cool if it weren’t so depressing.  Who am I kidding? It’s REALLY cool despite being depressing.  Almost every major metropolitan area in the United States is incredibly segregated.

Partly, this is because like calls to like, sure, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.  I’ve seen white flight first hand.  I’ve seen gentrification (which is a polite word for rich white people kicking out poor colored people) first hand.  I’ve seen property taxes rise disproportionately higher in poor areas with little justification.  These issues can’t be blamed on like calling to like.

There are no easy answers to these problems.  Heck, I can’t even come up with good questions to address the problem.  All I know is we’ve now had 50+ years of cramming poor people into low rent high rises with disastrous results.  Most cities seem to realize this, but the answers are often tearing down the high rises and leaving the poor with no place to go but the suburbs.  This is not a step in the right direction.

We need local laws that require landlords to set aside 10% or so of their units for subsidized housing.  We need to stop being able to tax people out of their homes.  We need to repeal the property tax and find some other ways to raise the lost revenue.  We need to do…something.  Because those maps don’t just represent an awesome blend of statistical analysis and data visualization.  They also represent a serious social failure.

I’m so glad I live in a post-racial America

Because otherwise the black guy in front of me at Subway who was told to pay for his food before the manager would make it while they happily made my food and had me pay afterwards would totally be able to claim racism. I’m sure the manager just forgot the normal order of operation for a second.

Of course, I didn’t say anything so I’m part of the problem.  I couldn’t believe it was happening.  You know how the mind kind of goes into “did I just see that?” mode?  Yeah, that was me.  Well, I won’t be visiting that particular Subway anymore. #slacktivism