What's Up with the Term, "People of Color?"

It’s much more than an objectively descriptive word.  “People of color “often is used by some non-whites, and even some whites, as a wedge, dividing humanity into two mutually exclusive camps.  On one side are white people, and on the other are all the rest, united in their “non-whiteness.”

Who would promote so destructive and cynical a distinction?  The answer, of course, is:  anyone with what is called a “dark triad” personality structure characterized by narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.  These are persons—Barack Hussein Obamas and Eric Himpton Holders— who so avariciously lust for profit, power, and prestige that they do not hesitate to climb over anyone or everyone to achieve their ends.   Dark triad individuals continually speak about “people of color” to keep the issue fresh in our national consciousness, and, thus, always available for their self-serving exploitations.

But not even a president or an attorney general can keep a malignantly divisive idea alive.  Many “lesser” persons, even a few everyday people, sometimes identify themselves as a person of color in a deliberate or unconscious attempt to extract even a small measure of personal or social advantage.

If I conceive of myself as a person of color:

Whatever failures I sustain can be mitigated, blamed on my racial victim status.

Whatever successes I achieve can be magnified by my racial victim status, “Look what I did despite the insuperable odds against me!”

Whenever I am angry, I can express hatred of the wicked white culture and vent rather than looking within myself for the source of my misery.

Whenever I feel alone, I can console myself by remembering that most of the world is populated by poor, downtrodden people of color who would understand my desperation and feeling of oppression.

If there is a benefit to be had, by referring to my person of color membership I can go to the head of the handout line, even if I am more objectively well-off than most of the “poor white trash” in line behind me.

As a person of color, I share in the glory of people of color heroes—past, present, and future—and I discount any Caucasian standouts.  For instance, I can reject George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the like as nothing but degenerate slave holders.  Instead of paying attention to them, I can band together with other people of color to cajole, threaten, and coerce our society into giving the lion’s share of societal attention to the accomplishments, holidays, and festivals related to Martin Luther King, Junior-like persons.

If you doubt the last point, some quiet time, take an elementary-age child aside.  Ask him/her to tell you about Washington, Jefferson, and King and merely tally the amount that he/she knows about each.  Then, ask the child how much classroom time was spent this year in talking about the three historical figures. 

Mumia and Geraldo: Birds of a Feather

The Associated Press reported today that Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Black Panther convicted of murdering white police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981, will serve life in prison, rather be executed as had been his sentence.  As far as I know, murder victims always remain dead, but those sentenced to death for murder almost never are executed.  Why?

Geraldo Rivera provided a “perfect” answer to the Abu-Jamal case this morning on Fox News when he rationalized that “It  [The execution of Jamal] only would exacerbate racial tensions in Philadelphia.”

Time to deconstruct Rivera’s comment and, in the process, to learn a little bit about race, crime, and journalism in America.

Geraldo’s remark suggests the “burn baby burn mentality” that implicitly or explicitly threatens mayhem whenever a “popular” bimp (black inner-city male person) is convicted of a crime against someone white.  The conviction always is framed as egregiously racist and indicative of the immorality of the “white” Justice System, even when that system is lead by a black Attorney General, in this case an “articulate fella” named Eric Himpton Holder, Junior.  No one ever worries that white people will burn down the city when O. J. Simpson-like "folks" go free.

Notice, too, that Geraldo Rivera uses the word, “exacerbate;” presuming that he, a New Yorker, knows all about Philadelphia.  He knows that Philadelphia is awash with racial tension because his saying so lends further credence, power, and urgency to his sage explanation of the logic of converting the death sentence to life imprisonment.   

Geraldo had his opinion about the mother of the apparently slain two year-old child, Caylee Anthony.  Her referred to that white woman, Casey Anthony, as a “narcissistic, child killing slut.”

So, what do we have here?  Geraldo Rivera, an attorney by education, had no problem with a sentence reduction for a convicted black cop killer.  On the other hand, he maligned the never-convicted Casey Anthony as a “slut.”  No matter what you or I thought about the Caylee Anthony death, to have her non-convicted mother mocked on national television was nothing short of a character assassination by broadcast.  Here we found Geraldo, a powerful, prominent so-called “person of color,” campaigning against a helpless white woman. Where were the National Organization for Women, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the sundry other groups who sanctimonious preach about women’s rights?  

Washington Senators 100, Obama 0

Barack Obama, who regards himself as the Great Communicator II, tried to stereotype George W.  Bush as a shoot-first-and –ask- questions- later, loco cowboy.  During the 2008 election, Obama promised to a “different” kind of president, more erudite, articulate, and cosmopolitan than “Bushy.”  After all, Barack lived in Indonesian from about age six to ten.  He even visited Africa for a couple months after graduating from college.   

From the outset then, Barack has been convinced that he and only he understands the intricacies of our world.  With his vastly superior intellect and unassailable logic, he, and only he, can present arguments of such persuasive power that all nations fall in line behind his Pied Pipership.

Barack Obama and his supporters touted him as “the man” who can “talk to our enemies,” despite his abject failure to even try to communicate effectively with Republicans in and out of government.

So, whaaaaa  happened this week?  You undoubtedly know: the United States Senate voted unanimously against President Obama.  That is, 51 Democrats, 47 Republicans, and 2 Independents slapped Barack down on Iran.   Against the advice of the Oval Office, all senators came out for tougher sanctions against Ayatollah land.  

When was the last time you found such anti-presidential cross-aisle unanimity on so critical an issue?  Does this mean that Barack, you now can call me “Hussein,” Obama might not be so great a communicator, either at home or abroad?

Democrat Senator Robert Menendez from New Jersey certainly did not have any faith in Barack Obama’s allegedly superior international relations skills.  To quote Josh Rogin’s article, (http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/12/01/menendez_livid_at_obama_team_s_push_to_shelve_iran_sanctions) Menendez livid at Obama team’s push to shelve Iran sanctions amendment :

The administration's strategy of working behind the scenes to change what's become the Kirk-Menendez Iran sanctions amendment, only to publicly oppose it today, angered several senators, including Robert Menendez himself. The New Jersey Democrat took seven minutes at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing to chastise Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman and Treasury Undersecretary David Cohen at Thursday's Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting for asking him to negotiate on their behalf, and then criticizing the compromise he struck with Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL).

Next time someone boasts of the President’s “fantastic” intellect, persuasive oratory, and foreign policy successes remind them of the Senate’s vote on Iran.

She's Super

Those from the Philadelphia area knew her well.  You, too, might know about her since I mentioned in my book that Arlene Ackerman, African American Philadelphia Superintendent of Schools, tried to blame Asian American students for causing an attack on them by their black schoolmates.  In fact, she resisted meeting with the Asian students, capitulating only when pressured to do so.  That pretty much sums-up the kind of superintendent that Arlene Ackerman was.

On November 29, 2011, myfoxphilly.com reminded us of Ackerman’s tenure.   According to the piece, she had been the highest paid government official in the city with $364,000 per annum.  When those who control the purse strings finally became irrevocably fed-up with the ill-tempered, cantankerous administrator, they gave her the boot before her contract had expired.   To do so, the virtually bankrupt school district had to buy her off with $905,000 and $86,000 worth of unused vacation/personal leave days.   According to myfoxphilly.com, “The school district had a $629 million deficit under Ackerman and it is still laying off employees as it struggles to make ends meet.”

Nothing new so far, many big city superintendents use, abuse, and discard the children and school districts about which they had professed unwavering love during their initial job interviews.  But Ackerman takes the scam-our-community rip-off to a new low.  Myfoxphilly suggest that Superintendent Ackerman has filed for unemployment benefits.

Guess the Superintendent has replaced the oft-spoken “give-back” to the neighborhood credo with the “take-more” philosophy.  What else would you expect from her?

The Legend of Barack Hussein Obama as Promoted with Taxpayer Dollars

Husna Haq of the Christian Science Monitor reported on October 27, 2011 that the United States State Department purchased $70,000 worth of Barack Obama books, mostly his autobiography, Dreams From My Father.  When questioned about the appropriateness of the action, according to Haq:

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told CNN it is "longstanding practice" to allow embassies to buy books, "to put them out in libraries ... give them to contacts, which they think will help deepen understanding of the U.S. political system, of U.S. political figures and leaders of U.S. history, U.S. culture."

Fox News pointed out, however, that the State Department did not disseminate either George W. Bush’s book or Bill Clinton’s.

Neither Haq nor Fox mentioned what I regard as the essential issue, however: the relevance of Dreams From My Father to anything remotely related to the State Department.  One could argue that John F. Kennedy’s best seller Profiles in Courage was the kind of book that warranted distribution by the State.  Profiles celebrated others—eight U.S. Senators who took unpopular positions of conscience in the interest of our country.  Dreams, on the other hand, amounted to a duplicitous, manipulative self-agrandizing fantasy—Barack Obama as a legend in his own mind. 

Obama, the narcissist, spent his time obsessing and writing about his favorite subject—himself.  And the State Department reinforced his self-absorption by helping to spread his self-serving identity propaganda as far and wide as possible.  Equally outrageous, Barack Obama will make a few bucks from the royalties that follow from the State’s purchases.

Nowhere could I find any information identifying the governmental official who made the decision to buy and disseminate the book.  I’m sure we never will discover who did so.  But we reasonably can speculate about that person. 

If it was not Barack or Michelle who chose use taxpayer money to buy and disseminate the Obamafuscation book, it clearly was someone enamored by the Emperor’s New Clothes, a person for whom fantasy of personal identity substitutes for hard-core reality, a person who REALLY wants to believe.  The person who made the purchase is the kind of individual who has made “President” Barack Hussein Obama possible, someone so intent on creating an identity-assuaging myth that he/she will do anything to promulgate it.   A little president-pandering probably played a part as well. 

Identities versus Issues

How does a society continue to develop and thrive?  We all know the answer:  through relentlessly and objectively discovering essential issues and problem solving our way through them together.  That is how America always has operated—issues before identities.

Then along comes Barack Hussein Obama and the problem solving process gets turned on its head.  The President does not think about problems that need solving, but subgroups who need placating—subgroups with whom he feels identity allegiance and/or to whom he is beholding.  

Consider the jobs crisis.  The old-fashioned American way would have been to discover tasks that must be addressed and means for doing so.  That process inexorably would have led us to discover the jobs that need to be filled, the skills and training that workers require, and the funding necessary to put the most qualified people to work.

Not so with Barack.  Obama listens to the demands of his favored interest groups, the group with whom he identifies and decides how to placate them.  Invariably, the identified-with groups share essential similarities with him, especially racial, ethnic, and philosophical similarities.  

So how about a couple interest groups to whom the pandering President devotes his attention, time, and resources?  

1.  Race-focused, especially black- and Hispanic-focused, programs of all sorts.  
Therefore, job-creation is not driven by needs of the market place, but by the kind of jobs that the favored groups are willing and capable of doing.  Low tech, low-skill, high-paying jobs tailored to persons with little education and limited English language skills do just fine.   

2.  Benefits based on the sexual orientation of the citizenry.  
Thus, the military should respond to sex-driven appetites of soldiers, sailors, and marines.  For instance, homo-erotic needs come first and the mission comes later.  In civilian life, work benefits must be provided for “life partners” of homosexual employees.  Why not provide equal benefits to the biological parents and siblings of all employees, if the workers live in a household with them?  Or is copulation, rather than blood-ties, the premier criterion for life-long commitment?      

3.  Unbridled, long-term government sponsored and funded health care for the Obama-defined “needy.” 

I guess we should expect that people given unlimited access to any and all extravagant medical procedures will show proper restrain in their use.  There are no hypochondrical, alcoholic, or drug-abusing “poor folks.”  No poor people whose own maladaptive lifestyles contribute to their ailments.

Occupy Wall Street: Notable Subgroups

Without a doubt, there are some sincere occupiers with noble intentions.  But, I am sure, these comprise a small minority.  Most streeters fall into several broad categories as follows:

 Retros  - “Folks” who have drunk the Jesse Jackson juice, causing them to become inebriated with the suggestion that the Wall Street protestors are heirs to the black civil rights movements.  Devoid of self esteem, the poor bastards need something to give them a bogus sense of value.

Quackos - More to be pitied than censured (as my grandmother used to say), these are persons terminally deficient in common sense.  They believe that the best way to lift themselves up is to drag other people down.   Like Jeremiah Wright, they also think that the United States created Aids to harm black people and that Paramount staged the 1969 moon landing.

Wackos - Flat out crazies.  Paranoids, psychopaths, and others of that ilk attempting to cope with their own psychotic-like confusion.  First, they project their delusions onto convenient targets, and then they do battle with them, thereby absolving themselves from personal responsibility for their own misery.

Smackos - Heroin, alcohol, and other substance abusers who regard Occupy encampments as nice places to conduct their drug business, have a bite to eat, and catch some Zs. 

Slackos - These are people who think that work is for saps.  They just love “hanging out.”  They wouldn’t stoop to doing any job for which they are qualified.   Many aspire to the NBA or NFL.

Bandidos – Criminals in the crowd, tingling with the excitement of kids in a candy store.  They single-out easy, naïve marks to rob or abuse within the relative anonymity of the teeming throng.

Subtract the retros, quackos, wackos, smackos, slackos, and bandidtos and what have you got?  About two dozen people who have genuine grievances and genuine desire to make a positive difference.  These are ones who you can talk to, the ones you can work with, and the ones who can help us make constructive social changes.  It would be nice to find a way to separate them out from the miscreants.         

Heavyweight Racial Hypocrisy

He called him “a gorilla.”

No.  The maligner was not a virulent white Southern racist.  It was Mohammed Ali, narcissistically attempting to contrast what he regarded as his pretty, brilliant self with Joe Frazier, the man he perceived as ugly and dumb—essentially subhuman.

Lonnae O’Neal Parker, an African American journalist, quoted Jelani Cobb, Rutgers Professor of African Studies at Rutgers University: “There was something searing and non-evolved about this tall, light-skinned black man calling another black man a gorilla. With the rest of America, especially black America, co-signing it.”  (Imagine if a white man had referred to Joe Frazier as a “gorilla.”)

The Parker article sometimes stated and sometimes implied how hurt and angry Frazier remained even in his later years; for instance, when Ali lit the Olympic Torch at the 1996 Games, Joe said that he would have liked to have tossed him into the flame.

Of course, as one would expect, Ali, the “real” black man, had to racialize his disdain for Frazier, calling him, “an Uncle Tom,” for only God knows what.  Parker quoted Janks Morton, Jr., whose father trained Sugar Ray Leonard, as saying,

“I can still see [Ali] sitting next to Howard Cosell punching that [rubber] black gorilla, saying, ‘It’s going to be a thrilla in Manila when I kill that gorilla.’ ”

Morton, 48, a documentary filmmaker from Laurel, says that “what Ali represented, that black-power vein, everybody was rooting for him. But we didn’t stop and pause to understand that was a painful period for Joe.”

Since Frazier died, Ali has decided that he will always remember Joe Frazier with “admiration and respect.”   Touching isn’t it?  This is a typical self-serving raceketeer trick—racially batter black identity non-conformers until there no longer is an advantage to continue.  Then take the high road and the bows appertaining.

Now there is a new black heavyweight on the scene.  He doesn’t box, but he has been a life-long fighter.  You might have heard of him—Herman Cain.  And, as one would expect, the black racial identity slavemasters are swarming. 

Long before accusations of sexual impropriety surfaced, Harry Belafonte, Jon Stewart and scores of others mocked Cain as being racially inappropriate, and some flat-out call him an Uncle Tom.  Chauncey DeVega on Salon.com wrote a piece called, “Herman Cain: Lover of Jim Crow, Apologist for White Racism."

The 21st Century slavemasters are trying to denigrate Cain’s racial credibility, just as Ali and his henchmen did to Joe Frazier.  When Herman dies, maybe they will conclude that he wasn’t so bad after all.

Beyond Class Warfare

We hear about it every day:  Barack Obama is attempting to incite class warfare.  To my mind this is a true but an incomplete assertion.   The class warfare that Obama promotes to his self-serving ends is more than class warfare; it is class warfare as a subset of identity warfare.

There is a critical difference:  Despite all its faults, class warfare is, at least, objective.  In class warfare one sets a measurable criterion to differentiate friend from foe.  Using a purely class warfare standard, Barack, for instance, might tell us that anyone making more than $250,000 a year, anyone who votes Republican, or anyone working on Wall Street are the enemy.  But Obama goes beyond class; he includes race, ideology, education, and whatever issue du jour suits him in any particular situation; he then decides on the fly the subjective criteria that determines who or what gets labeled as it does.  For instance, any black, no matter how black, is “not black enough,” if he or she disagrees with Barack.  You can be sure that Herman Cain would not be considered a “real” African American according to the Obama metric.

Barack Obama is fond of finding a scapegoat, exaggerating what he feels are its negative qualities, and encouraging his followers to denigrate, humiliate, and castigate the scapegoated person or idea.  Watch him, listen to him, and you will find this occurring again and again.  

In short, the President who does not embrace his biracial identity not only is a slave to his own identity conflict, he is an identity slavemaster.  Like Santa Claus, Barack Obama makes his list, checks it twice, and then determines who’s naughty and nice.  Unlike Santa, Obama is not content merely to put coal in the stockings of the naughty.  Barack Hussein Obama also incites his minions to punish anyone whose identity conflicts with his own.  Remember Joe Wurzelbacher, the plumber, who on October 12, 2008  challenged Obama’s tax plan?  According to Julian Sanchez,

In the days following the debate, The Columbus Dispatch reported this weekend, Wurzelbacher's file at the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles was accessed three times. The information requests came from accounts associated with the office of the state attorney general, the Toledo Police Department, and the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency. The attorney general's office has said, however, that the request did not come from their office, but from a "test account" used by their IT division and shared with other law enforcement agencies.   

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/10/joe-the-plumber-database-snooping-under-investigation.ars

Racialized Thought: A Special Form of Irrationality

In the aftermath of the 911 terrorist attacks, the American lexicon expanded to include “stovepiping,” an information science term used to explain how government agencies had created separate intelligence-related data bases that were not being shared among law enforcement, and thus endangered American security.

  
Post hoc, everyone realized the danger of rigidly compartmentalizing information.  We all knew that truth and informed action result only when relevant ideas climb in the ring together and engage in a knock-down, drag-out fight within the public discourse arena.  To remedy the stovepiping problem, talking heads advised security analysts to “connect the dots,” meaning, of course, that information should be culled from multiple sources, juxtaposed, and honestly evaluated—a suggestion so obvious that even Barack Obama endorsed the practice so long as the resulting information did not undermine his Machiavellian ends.

On the other hand, Barack Obama always has stovepiped the elements of his racial identity, separating the black half of his being from the white, dragging out the white portion only when he needed to do so.  You recall, for instance, that Barack first got into hot water during the 2008 presidential election by denigrating working-class Caucasians by suggesting that "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." and then distributed a political ad showing himself surrounded by his white mother, grandmother, and grandfather.

Obama’s stovepiping is one example of a general form of racial irrationality rampant within contemporary American culture—an irrationality that permits black and white raceketeers to separate racially related information mostly in the service of a pro-black agenda.  

Switch on your radio or television and you will find multiple examples of racial stovepiping.  For instance, I recently heard a news report lamenting the fact that the black unemployment rate currently stands at 16.7%, its highest rate since 1984. From time to time the piece said or strongly implied that the black rate was disgraceful and an example of American racism. 

Certainly, everyone should be sympathetic to any group suffering unemployment.  But let’s add another data point: black underachievement.  When expedient to raise support for increasing inner-city school budgets, we hear that African Americans have a shamefully low 57% graduation rate.  Data point number three: communities with the least educated workforce have the highest rates of unemployment.

Let’s help raceketeers connect the dots.  Black unemployment is a direct result of insufficient black educational commitment.  The racial storm troopers should spend their time facilitating African American education and other training rather than searching for cultural scapegoats.

Racialized thinking is a dead end strategy that benefits no one—least of all black people.