Living Life Abundantly

update 2/20 at 10:20 am: Thanks Steve for pointing out the error in the title of this post…which had the Washington Post. It’s NY Post, the correction to the titles has been made.

Yesterday my hubby was worked up about a political cartoon I hadn’t seen.  I caught a glimpse of Al Sharpton talking about it on MSNBC but I immediately tuned out. I was in my own world not wanting to take in anything that wouldn’t make me feel good. I have days when my theme song is Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News… Over the past couple of weeks its been bad news with good news sprinkled in between across all fronts.

But last night after my girl Marci called upset too about the same cartoon, I knew I had to SEE what the heck was going on.

The Cartoon by Sean Delonas As Seen In The NY Post

What’s Wrong With This Cartoon?  What’s The Big Deal?

Before I get into MY interpretation of this VILE cartoon, I want to make sure that we are all clear on a few things:

1. I Love White People.

2. Some Of My Best Friends Are White.

3. I am a Black woman from Compton with preconceived notions about POLICE (to put it mildly NWA was my favorite group growing up…get the picture?)

It’s important that we all understand these three points because there is a tendency for people to see my picture in all my blackness and assume that I’m a terrorist fist bumping militant Comptonite looking for ways to blame “the man”. Thats not me! I want to make it abundantly clear here and now. The the 3rd is an important point because oftentimes our experiences do play a part in shaping our perceptions.

What is obvious to one person may not be so obvious to another.  While it’s extremely hard for me to see how anyone else might see something different from what I see in this image…. I know its possible and that in some crazy way this may be like a paradigm (but I doubt it).

Now Here Are My Thoughts On The Cartoon:

“Don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining.” — Unknown

That drawing is very offensive. I would even go as far as calling it a borderline (tap dancing in gray areas) treasonous  domestic terroristic threat.  In my opinion the drawing published by the NY Posts boldly suggests that the Commander and Chief (our 44th President not the 43rd) is a monkey deserving to be shot and killed for passing the Stimulus Bill. For the past two weeks or more the stimulus bill has been referred to as Obama’s stimulus bill ….the text on this cartoon reads:

“They’ll Have To Find SOMEONE Else To Write The Next Stimulus Bill.”

The word someone is singular (meaning ‘someone’ refers to one person). The cartoonist could have said “some other people” or “some more people” etc… but he deliberately chose the word someone. Clearly this cartoon is not about any of the people (plural) that had input and/or supported the Stimulus Bill. This cartoon is a about someone in particular!!!  Someone! Which one? That one? SOMEONE! Have we forgotten the whole Curious George t-shirt thing?

Here’s the bottom line:

The shot up bleeding dead monkey laying on the sidewalk (next to probably Main Street) in a city near parked cars and a beware of dog sign shot by the white police officers represents the person that signed the Stimulus Bill, President Barack Obama.

This is not the first time that monkey imagery has been used with regards to Barack Obama.  It is certainly not the first time that monkey imagery has been used to depict a Black man. (*note to anyone thinking but Barack Obama is 1/2 white… yes we all know and acknowledge that he’s biracial.  However, historically in this country dating back to slavery a drop of black means you’re black period…I didn’t make the rules.  Apparently, it’s the American way.  When you fill out a job application, the bubbles on the SAT, or the forms at the dentist… there is no box for biracial).

The Two White Police (Overseers) Officers in the cartoon represent the white supremacy system that has ruled this land with an iron fist for centuries (YES I SAID CENTURIES). Police are supposed to serve and protect (who and what is often the question).  In this cartoon, the police are serving and protecting not just “the establishment” but the establishment of white supremacy.  The officers have no other way to subdue or over power the animal (its stronger faster and has more power), so they shoot it!  A lot of power comes with being President of the United States and while a great number of us are happy with our current president, there are still those that feel threatened by his Presidency. (Especially white supremacists).

I know that any mention of white supremacy causes discomfort for some folks but you would have to be in extreme denial or living under a rock in another galaxy far far away to not be aware of the system that many blacks and whites have fought side by side to overthrow. YES I SAID OVERTHROW!!!!!  That cartoon reeks of white supremacy imagery all the way down to the “beware of dog” sign. I’m surprised there was no fire hydrant and hose!

Right here in America, dogs were used to hunt down runaway slaves and later to attack Civil Rights Marchers.  They still use dogs (don’t you watch Cops).  That “beware of dog” sign in that drawing screams ugliness.  I know some people think Black people need to get over it and move forward (I never hear anyone say anything like that about my Jewish brothers and sisters)…My answer to ‘Black people getting over it and moving forward’ is most of us have… but the fact that we have does not erase or rewrite the past. History is what it is!  We teach history in schools because we should LEARN from our history right?

History teaches us that Police Overseers have not been kind to Black folks.  In fact, we hear about cases of police brutality and killings almost every day!

Many of us have an inherent distrust of Police and it usually takes a friend or family member to become one for us to even open our minds to the possibility that all police are not the same…. (Sad huh?) So if it’s like that for some Black people, how must it be for some White police officers?

The fact that the cartoonist chose to show cops shooting a monkey on a city street is bothersome for the above reasons but also another reason… while there is no street sign in the drawing, that scene appears to be Main Street.  You know the hypothetical street that every day Americans live on that President Barack Obama and others often refer to…  If the monkey was shot for presumably wanting to help those on Main street, what would the officers rather happen with the folks on Main Street? (Let Them Eat Cake I Guess)

BOYCOTT:

To abstain from or act together in abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with as an expression of protest or disfavor or as a means of coercion.

So why boycott?  Well it’s a means of hitting them where it hurts (their pockets). They being those responsible for publishing the cartoon. (see the note from The Color of Change below).

“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” — Marcus Garvey

Color of Change

Yesterday, the day after President Obama signed his stimulus bill into law, the NY Post ran a cartoon depicting the bill’s “author” as a dead monkey, covered in blood after being shot by police. You can see the image by clicking on the link below.

In the face of intense criticism, the Post’s editor is standing by the cartoon, claiming that it’s not about Obama, has no racial undertones, and that it was simply referencing a recent incident when police shot a pet chimpanzee. But it’s impossible to believe that any newspaper editor could be ignorant enough to not understand how this cartoon evokes a history of racist symbolism, or how frightening this image feels at a time when death threats against President Obama have been on the rise.

Please join me and other ColorOfChange.org members in demanding that the Post apologize publicly and fire the editor who allowed this cartoon to go to print:

http://www.colorofchange.org/nypost/?id=2148-349821

The Post would have us believe that the cartoon is not about Obama. But on the page just before the cartoon appears, there’s a big picture of Obama signing the stimulus bill. A reader paging through the Post would see Obama putting pen to paper, then turn the page to see this violent cartoon. The imagery is chilling.

There is a clear history in our country of racist symbolism that depicts Black people as apes or monkeys, and it came up multiple times during the presidential campaign.

We’re also in a time of increased race-based violence. In the months following President Obama’s election there has been a nationwide surge in hate crimes ranging from vandalism to assaults to arson on Black churches. There has been an unprecedented number of threats against President Obama since he was elected, with hate-based groups fantasizing about the killing of the president. Just a week ago, a man drove from Louisiana to the Capitol with a rifle, telling the police who stopped him that he had a “delivery” for the president.

There is no excuse for the Post to have allowed this cartoon to be printed, and even less for Editor Col Allan’s outright dismissal of legitimate concerns.

But let’s be clear who’s behind the Post: Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch, the Post’s owner, is the man behind FOX News Channel. FOX has continually attacked and denigrated Black people, politicians, institutions at every opportunity, and ColorOfChange has run several campaigns to make clear how FOX poisons public debate.

I don’t expect much from Murdoch. However, with enough public pressure, we can set the stage for advertisers and subscribers to think long and hard before patronizing outlets like the Post that refuse to be held accountable.

You can help, by making clear that the Post’s behavior is unacceptable, and by asking your friends and family to do the same. Please join me:

http://www.colorofchange.org/nypost/?id=2148-349821

Should African Americans Get Reparations for Slavery?

When the topic of reparations comes up people get very heated and opinionated… oftentimes without even knowing the facts or history behind reparations. Read the full story

Note: This article appeared in the Baltimore Sun newspaper and was written by a Caucasian professor of Journalism at the University of Texas. The article appears here on Living Life Abundantly Marenda.Biz with permission directly from the author.

White People Need to Acknowledge
Benefits of Unearned Privilege © by Robert Jensen

Here’s what white privilege sounds like: I’m sitting in my University of Texas office, talking to a very bright and very conservative white student about affirmative action in college admissions, which he opposes and I support. The student says he wants a level playing field with no unearned advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he thinks that being white has advantages in the United States. Have either of us, I ask, ever benefited from being white in a world run mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes, there is something real and tangible we could call white privilege. So, if we live in a world of white privilege – unearned white privilege – how does that affect your notion of a level playing field? I asked. He paused for a moment and said, “That really doesn’t matter.” That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate white privilege: The privilege to acknowledge that you have unearned privilege but to ignore what it means. That exchange led me to rethink the way I talk about race and racism with students. It drove home the importance of confronting the dirty secret that we white people carry around with us every day: in a world of white privilege, some of what we have is unearned. I think much of both the fear and anger that comes up around discussions of affirmative action has its roots in that secret. So these days, my goal is to talk open and honestly about white supremacy and white privilege.

White privilege, like any social phenomenon, is complex. In a white supremacist culture, all white people have privilege, whether or not they are overtly racist themselves. There are general patterns, but such privilege plays out differently depending on context and other aspects of one’s identity (in my case, being male gives me other kinds of privilege). Rather than try to tell others how white privilege has played out in their lives, I talk about how it has affected me.

I am as white as white gets in this country. I am of northern European heritage and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the country. I grew up in a virtually all-white world surrounded by racism, both personal and institutional. Because I didn’t live near a reservation, I didn’t even have exposure to the state’s only numerically significant nonwhite population, American Indians.

I have struggled to resist that racist training and the racism of my culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I “fix” myself, one thing never changes – I walk through the world with white privilege.

What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission to a university, apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don’t look threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me look like me they are white. They see in me a reflection of themselves – and in a racist world, that is an advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of them. I am not dangerous. Even when I voice critical opinions, I am cut some slack. After all, I’m white.

My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I am white. Some complain that affirmative action has meant the university is saddled with mediocre minority professors. I have no doubt there are minority faculty who are mediocre, though I don’t know very many. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. once pointed out, if affirmative action policies were in place for the next hundred years, it’s possible that at the end of that time the university could have as many mediocre minority professors as it has mediocre white professors. That isn’t meant as an insult to anyone, but it’s a simple observation that white privilege has meant that scores of second-rate white professors have slid through the system because their flaws were overlooked out of solidarity based on race, as well as on gender, class and ideology.

Some people resist the assertions that the United States is still a bitterly racist society and that the racism has real effects on real people. But white folks have long cut other white folks a break. I know, because I am one of them. I am not a genius – as I like to say, I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I have been teaching full time for six years and I’ve published a reasonable amount of scholarship. Some of it is the unexceptional stuff one churns out to get tenure, and some of it, I would argue, is worth reading. I worked hard, and I like to think that I’m a fairly decent teacher. Every once in a while, I leave my office at the end of the day feeling like I really accomplished something. When I cash my pay check, I don’t feel guilty. But, all that said, I know I did not get where I am by merit alone. I benefited from among other things, white privilege. That doesn’t mean that I don’t deserve my job, or that if I weren’t white I would never have gotten the job. It means simply that all through my life, I have soaked up benefits for being white.

All my life I have been hired for jobs by white people. I was accepted for graduate school by white people. And I was hired for a teaching position by the predominantly white University of Texas, headed by a white president, in a college headed by a white dean and in a department with a white chairman that at the time had one nonwhite tenured professor. I have worked hard to get where I am, and I work hard to stay there. But to feel good about myself, and my work, I do not have to believe that “merit” as defined by white people in a white country, alone got me here. I can acknowledge that in addition to all that hard work, I got a significant boost from white privilege. At one time in my life, I would not have been able to say that, because I needed to believe that my success in life was due solely to my individual talent and effort. I saw myself as the heroic American, the rugged individualist. I was so deeply seduced by the culture’s mythology that I couldn’t see the fear that was binding me to those myths.

Like all white Americans, I was living with the fear that maybe I didn’t really deserve my success, that maybe luck and privilege had more to do with it than brains and hard work. I was afraid I wasn’t heroic or rugged, that I wasn’t special. I let go of some of that fear when I realized that, indeed, I wasn’t special, but that I was still me. What I do well, I still can take pride in, even when I know that the rules under which I work in are stacked to my benefit. Until we let go of the fiction that people have complete control over their fate – that we can will ourselves to be anything we choose – then we will live with that fear.

White privilege is not something I get to decide whether I want to keep. Every time I walk into a store at the same time as a black man and the security guard follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am benefiting from white privilege. There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out in our daily lives, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased from this society.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center http://thirdcoastactivist.org.He is the author of: The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books) Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang) Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity Robert Jensen can be reached at [email protected] and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html1234567890