Is Madonna a White Racist?

Please excuse the title that I absentmindedly chose for this post.  Popular opinion has it that only Caucasians can be racist, so to include the word “white” with racist is redundant.  I guess I’ll never learn politically correct double-speak.  That said, let us turn our attention to the inimitable Madonna.  

On January 18, 2014 the Associated Press published a piece entitled "Madonna apologizes for racial slur," claiming that the singer had posted an Instagram of her son Rocco in a boxing stance and used a hashtag that included a "variation" of the word "nigger."

So, is Madonna a white racist?  Let's consider just a couple well-documented facts.  First, in addition to her two natural white children, Madonna adopted and mothers in her home two black African kids, David Banda and Mercy James.  Second, Madonna has dated black men and regularly employs and performs amicably with blacks of both genders.  Finally, the word nigger is ubiquitous among the singer's professional intimates being used by them as noun, adjective, adverb, or predicate in everyday conversation. 

The indictment of Madonna is anti-white racial exploitation as usual.  [Even Bill Clinton, who always had been the only true white political darling of African Americans, was accused of racism when his wife, Hillary, ran against Barack Obama during the 2008 Democrat Primary.] In America, nigger is not so much a word as it is an implement used by unscrupulous individuals and groups for personal gain.  Sometimes the implement is employed to make a few bucks, such as when nigger is mentioned in films or music.  The grio.com, a black website, suggests that nigger appears "in approximately 89,000 popular rap songs.” ( http://thegrio.com/2014/01/20/madonna-offers-non-apology-for-use-of-the-n-word/ )

Grio.com also underscores the second feature of nigger as an implement  and what I believe is the primary reason for its continuing popularity: "nigger' is a weapon that some blacks employ whenever it is to their advantage. Merely by accusing whites of saying it, the accused white is put on the defensive and forced to "prove" that he/she did not utter the accursed word.  At that point all non-race-oriented discussion ends with the white being unable to pursue his/her own agenda.  Racial manipulators just love to "put white folks in their place," by indicating what "black folks" will and will not allow whites to say, all the while insisting that blacks can say the very same verboten things. Thus, the Grio writer, previously referenced who commented about the frequency of the so-called n-word in rap songs, goes on to lecture Madonna and all Caucasians as follows:  

Madonna’s non-apology for her n-word Instagram caption is yet another example of how the word has become overly complicated throughout the years. There is a very simple rule that will make life easier for everyone. If you are not black, do not ever use the word the n-word or any variation of it. Period.

I can provide advice too.  During my youth, racial and ethnic slurs were as common as dandelions.  For instance, In addition to calling blacks niggers, Hispanics were called spics, Chinese were chinks, Polish were pollocks, Italians were dagoes, and Irish were "pig shit Irish."  Virtually every group regularly maligned the others. That practice was divisive and disgraceful.  Fortunately, members of ethnic groups vociferously spoke against the slurs and never used them to refer to each other.  There were no songs using the slurs and no one profited by exploiting the slurs.  Aided and abetted by widespread use within the African American community and by racially-oriented profiteering, "nigger" remains the only truly popular slur.  I guess we know why.

How You Know a White Man Is a Racist

Worth a Thousand Words.  Photo is courtesy of my friend, Dick

Got an Advocacy Group?

Justice is an illusion, at least in the contemporary world.  Although regularly promised to all, it is dispensed only to few.  Consider the ultimate justice: respect for human life.  Is one group more deserving of living than another one?  National leaders make such choices as a regular feature of their commander-in-chief positions. For example, on March 18, 2011, Barack Obama rationalized the United States' bombing of Libya by sanctimoniously asserting, "For decades, he's [Moammar Gadhafi has] demonstrated his willingness to use brute force. Here's why this matters to us: Left unchecked, we have every reason to believe Gadhafi would commit atrocities against his own people. Many thousands could die."   Yet, as I write this blog, to date Obama has done nothing substantive to prevent the deaths of approximately 40,000 Syrian civilians. Are Syrians less worthy of protection than are Libyans?

Libyans were protected because they had vociferous advocates who tirelessly fought for them. The Syrians had anemic supporters and learned the hard but simple lesson that everyone who wants American help needs a powerful advocacy group in America.

In the United States, lobbyists provide professional advocacy for social organizations, interest groups of all sorts, and businesses: cajoling, wining and dining, or bribing officials to ensure that laws, grants, and other government benefits accrue to the lobbyists' employers.  Almost every racial group has lobbyists, too. Below  is a very small sample of some of the lobbies.

Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (Asian, etc.), Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights (Black), Council on American-Islamic Relations (Arab, etc), Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (Hispanic), NAACP (Black), NAACP Legal Defense Fund (Black), National Action Network (Black), National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium (Asian, etc.) National Association for the Education of African American Children with Learning Disabilities (Black), National Council of La Raza (Hispanic), Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (Hispanic), NAACP (Black), NAACP Legal Defense Fund (Black), National Action Network (Black), National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium (Asian), National Association for the Education of African American Children with Learning Disabilities (Black), National Council of La Raza (Hispanic), National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce (Gay, etc),  National Urban League (Black), Native American Rights Fund (American Indian), Rainbow/PUSH Coalition (Black).

Just like the Syrians, white Americans have no viable advocacy group.  If a serious attempt was made to form one, a furor would result with those in opposition calling the proposed white group “racist” and equating it to the Ku Klux Klan.

We hear loud and clear from Barack Obama who regularly conducts his own personal and White House staff racial lobbying, such as when he publicly and passionately argued for two  black citizens: Barack's friend Henry Louis Gates Junior, and Barack's “he could have been my son” Trayvon Martin.  But Obama has said not one single word about the recent epidemic of black-on-white assaults referred to as the “knock-out game.”  In fact, the President never has commented on any white-only victimization, not even when whites were threatened with violence when they went to vote in Philadelphia during the 2008 presidential election when the New Black Panther Party stationed armed thugs at polling places

Without an effective advocacy group, white citizens are powerless to assert their group-relevant rights, not even able to assert their right to bodily protection from physical assault, rape and homicide.  Therefore, no one hears about or openly talks about the statistically documented fact that black-on-white crime is exponentially higher than white-on-black crime.  Unlike blacks, white people have no advocacy group to organize a protest campaign. So whites never march in the street, sit-in, or otherwise effectively unite when they are racially victimized.  One must conclude that there is no advocacy and no justice for whites where race is concerned and that white lives and safety are less valued than are the lives and safety of non-white Americans.

Experts in Self-Serving Racial Manipulation

      

I am sure you, as I, learned in early elementary school that science is a special human endeavor executed by rational, committed professionals who relentlessly follow the truth wherever it leads.  We were told that scientists objectively collect data through valid and reliable methods, perform valid and reliable experiments, and report results without bias.  We were led to believe that scientists choose their professions out of love of their subject, not due to preconceived, emotionally charged conflicts that they must work through.   No one ever suggested to us that scientists racially proselytize, probably because racial proselytizing is not and never has been science.

If you accept my aforementioned premises about science and scientists, you may be interested to learn about Derald Wing Sue, an Asian American, who was recently selected as a distinguished career contributor to psychology by the American Psychological Association (APA) for his work in “racial-cultural bias.”  Since I do not know Dr. Sue personally, I base my comments on the bio written about him in the November, 2013 American Psychologist, APA’s flagship journal.   Let’s see whether our “distinguished career contributor” sounds like a dispassionate truth seeker.

In the bio we are told that Derald has six siblings, three of whom obtained psychology doctorates.  “Sibling rivalry” is cited and presumably was assuaged somewhat in that the psychologist brothers allegedly “found validation in one another’s ideas” about the ethnocentrism of American psychology.  In fact, the brothers so reinforced each other’s race-oriented preoccupations that “colleagues would often confuse the Sues for one another, and this caused mistakes in crediting the works of one brother for those of the others.”

It appears then the Sue boys helped overcome their sibling rivalry by finding a common enemy: ethnocentricity, a word that in this case is a euphemism for racism.  Derald also blamed his conflicted ethnic identity for "feeling like an outcast" and "recalls allowing himself to feel ashamed of his racial/cultural heritage and battling a sense of racial inferiority."  When bothered by those emotions, "He would often turn to his brothers for support because they were the only ones who seemed to understand these feelings; they would often talk about the meaning of being Chinese, the hostility of an invalidating society, and the harmful consequences it had on their self-esteem and standard of living.”    

During the course of his psychology career, Derald Sue’s racial obsession caused interpersonal problems for him.  Because of it, psychologist colleagues tried to have him removed from editorship of the Journal of Counseling and Development.

Given his history, one might question Dr. Sue’s racial objectivity.  But no one would be surprised to learn that “racial microaggressions” (defined as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults to the target person or group.”) has been Derald’s signature professional preoccupation and the reason for both his acclaim and censure.  The acclaim has come mostly from Sue’s APA establishment cronies and the censure from rank and file professional psychologists such as Kenneth R. Thomas who rebutted Sue in his article “Micrononsense in Multiculturalism.”  (American Psychologist, Vol 63(4), May-Jun 2008, 274-275.)

The “data” of racial microaggressions actually are purely subjective opinions determined by persons with a vested, determined interest in making a social point, namely that white people are responsible for the ills of all other peoples on earth.  If a white person hesitates, glances away, or cuts short an interaction with a non-white, that white person is guilty of microaggression racism.  The methods of racial microaggression studies always involve alleged victimization only of non-whites.  I literally never have seen one study that investigates the possibility of racial microaggressions against white people.  In fact, I have never found a single APA study that has addressed anti-white racism as a subject in and of itself.  It is as if no “person of color” ever has harbored racist feelings or performed racist actions against whites.

In my opinion, Dr. Sue is the kind of psychologist and racial microaggresssion is the kind of concept that undermines public faith in the “science” of psychology.  Like Barack Obama, Derald Sue has managed to parlay his own racial obsession into notoriety by appealing to some “people of color” who, like he, seize upon any reason to blame whites for any of their own personal shortcomings and by appealing to some racially masochistic whites desperately seeking a warped sense of racial vindication.

I suggest that Dr. Derald Wing Sue and the American Psychological Association investigate crime statistics that document the fact that black-on-white aggression is exponentially higher than white-on-black aggression.  And I am not talking about phony, subjective racial microaggression, I am talking about violent crime—homicide, aggravated assault and rape.  Perhaps a little more time and effort can be spent on solving those race-based “social problems.”   Maybe someday in the very remote future an investigator will be recognized by APA as being a distinguished career contributor to psychology for his or her work concerning real, objectively documented anti-white aggression perpetrated by so-called people-of-color.