Applying the Standard on Hate
09/30/05 08:10 AM
I
heard Bill Bennett's publicly aired notion that
crime reduction would be greatly aided by
the abortion of all black male
babies. It's telling
that this example flew to his mind in discussing
the limits of abortion as a social engineering
technique. He didn't immediately seize upon the
fact that white Southern males are the most
violent Americans, for instance. He did not
suggest that you could reduce violence in the
country by aborting all Southern white male
babies. A 1992 article from Richard E. Nisbett,
Ph.D. of the University of Michigan Institute
for Social Research stated the following:
The U.S. South, and western regions of the U.S. initially settled by Southerners, are more violent than the rest of the country. Homicide rates for White Southern males are substantially higher than those for White Northern males, especially in rural areas.
In discussing Nisbett's work, an article in Psychology Today noted:
It's long been claimed that the South and western regions settled by Southerners are more violent. Even de Tocqueville couldn't help noticing. Nisbett's detailed analysis of homicide rates from FBI files demonstrates that they're not only higher in the South, but highest in small Southern towns and cities and rural areas, especially the hills and dry plains appropriate for herding.
For small cities, homicide rates are three times higher in the South than in New England, Nisbett told the American Psychological Association meeting in Washington, D.C. In subregions such as the Texas Panhandle, the homicide rate is five times that in the similar terrain of Nebraska.
But Bennett did not seize on this extreme of violence. He seized upon the statistic that most suited his audience, and his own mindset--that of black male criminality--the American archetype of the black male predator, out to take the white man's women and his other property.
Bennett's comments reminded me of a seminar I attended in LA years ago. The seminar was arranged by right wing freak David Horowitz, whose historic propensity for stupidity, intellectual featherweightdom and infantile desire to shock is displayed as much by his 60s devotion to the Black Panthers as it is by his current devotion to the racist right. One of the speakers was Bill Bennett's wife, Elayne, discussing her Best Friends Foundation, which teaches abstinence education in the DC public schools.
She stood there, this white, bleach-blonde, faux Stepford horror, talking about teaching young black adolescent girls the joys of not fucking, and I couldn't help wonder what other lessons she taught as well. Here she was, the white woman come to save the colored girls from their racial predisposition toward moral looseness. The Great White Mother, preaching abstinence-only to girls who need to know the benefits of delaying sex until intellectual maturity, but who also desperately need to know how to protect themselves now -- should they choose otherwise. I wondered why it was so important to this woman that these black girls not fuck? If she were interested in preventing teen pregnancies to help guarantee these girls a better life, she would add contraceptive education to her mix. But she doesn't do that. She preaches a doctrine sure to fail among a significant number of teenage girls--and she chooses to preach it to black ones. Why?
Part of my suspicion was the company she kept. This was a seminar at which it was suggested, in all seriousness, that white American settlers did native Americans a service through genocide. After all, this speaker said, they would have killed each other through inter-tribal wars anyway. This was a gathering of the racist right. So how, I asked, could this woman be teaching anything to black girls if it weren't laced with her contempt for people of color?
Why do I assume she holds black in contempt? Because one is judged by the company one keeps. If I, or any black man, woman or child, were a confidante of Louis Farrakhan, I would be called an anti-semite and anti-white. If I supported with Hamas' healthcare initiatives in the West Bank, I would be called an anti-semite by the right. If I so much as suggested that some of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians were barbaric, I would be called an anti-semite by the right.
Yet, the Republicans adopt a Southern Strategy aimed at exploiting race hatred among southern whites, and no one calls them racists. They make bold attempts during the 2000 election to suppress the black vote, and no one calls them racists. They embrace racist institutions like Bob Jones University and the Council of Conservative Citizens and no one calls them racists. They support and coddle unreconstructed haters like Jesse Helms, but no one calls them racists. They embrace Bill Bennett, who ignores the fact of white southern criminality and boldly suggests that black men are born criminals, and no one calls them racists.
Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas. By the standards above, conservatives are accurate tagged, The Racist Right. They have gorged on race hatred like vampires on blood. They have grown fat, vicious, and drunk with it. Race hatred--the suggestion of it, the exploitation of it, the hint of it, the bold declaration of it-- is among their major calling cards and bait to a significant portion of their devotees.
George Bush speaks at Bob Jones, lending their racist policies his approval. Thus, George Bush traffics in race hatred. He is a racist. It's that simple. I will use the same standards of hate that the right uses against blacks, or any other cause they wish to suppress.
Jeb Bush seeks to suppress the constitutional rights of blacks to vote--no one else, just blacks. Thus, Jeb Bush traffics in race hatred. Jeb Bush is a racist.
Bill Bennett ignores one set of statistics for another in order to denigrate blacks. He traffics in race hatred. Bennett is a racist.
Any politician who, when asked, does not condemn Bennett's words, as any black politician would be asked to condemn Farrakhan's, agrees with Bennett's choice of one statistic over another, and therefore traffics in race hatred, and is a racist.
One standard for all.
The U.S. South, and western regions of the U.S. initially settled by Southerners, are more violent than the rest of the country. Homicide rates for White Southern males are substantially higher than those for White Northern males, especially in rural areas.
In discussing Nisbett's work, an article in Psychology Today noted:
It's long been claimed that the South and western regions settled by Southerners are more violent. Even de Tocqueville couldn't help noticing. Nisbett's detailed analysis of homicide rates from FBI files demonstrates that they're not only higher in the South, but highest in small Southern towns and cities and rural areas, especially the hills and dry plains appropriate for herding.
For small cities, homicide rates are three times higher in the South than in New England, Nisbett told the American Psychological Association meeting in Washington, D.C. In subregions such as the Texas Panhandle, the homicide rate is five times that in the similar terrain of Nebraska.
But Bennett did not seize on this extreme of violence. He seized upon the statistic that most suited his audience, and his own mindset--that of black male criminality--the American archetype of the black male predator, out to take the white man's women and his other property.
Bennett's comments reminded me of a seminar I attended in LA years ago. The seminar was arranged by right wing freak David Horowitz, whose historic propensity for stupidity, intellectual featherweightdom and infantile desire to shock is displayed as much by his 60s devotion to the Black Panthers as it is by his current devotion to the racist right. One of the speakers was Bill Bennett's wife, Elayne, discussing her Best Friends Foundation, which teaches abstinence education in the DC public schools.
She stood there, this white, bleach-blonde, faux Stepford horror, talking about teaching young black adolescent girls the joys of not fucking, and I couldn't help wonder what other lessons she taught as well. Here she was, the white woman come to save the colored girls from their racial predisposition toward moral looseness. The Great White Mother, preaching abstinence-only to girls who need to know the benefits of delaying sex until intellectual maturity, but who also desperately need to know how to protect themselves now -- should they choose otherwise. I wondered why it was so important to this woman that these black girls not fuck? If she were interested in preventing teen pregnancies to help guarantee these girls a better life, she would add contraceptive education to her mix. But she doesn't do that. She preaches a doctrine sure to fail among a significant number of teenage girls--and she chooses to preach it to black ones. Why?
Part of my suspicion was the company she kept. This was a seminar at which it was suggested, in all seriousness, that white American settlers did native Americans a service through genocide. After all, this speaker said, they would have killed each other through inter-tribal wars anyway. This was a gathering of the racist right. So how, I asked, could this woman be teaching anything to black girls if it weren't laced with her contempt for people of color?
Why do I assume she holds black in contempt? Because one is judged by the company one keeps. If I, or any black man, woman or child, were a confidante of Louis Farrakhan, I would be called an anti-semite and anti-white. If I supported with Hamas' healthcare initiatives in the West Bank, I would be called an anti-semite by the right. If I so much as suggested that some of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians were barbaric, I would be called an anti-semite by the right.
Yet, the Republicans adopt a Southern Strategy aimed at exploiting race hatred among southern whites, and no one calls them racists. They make bold attempts during the 2000 election to suppress the black vote, and no one calls them racists. They embrace racist institutions like Bob Jones University and the Council of Conservative Citizens and no one calls them racists. They support and coddle unreconstructed haters like Jesse Helms, but no one calls them racists. They embrace Bill Bennett, who ignores the fact of white southern criminality and boldly suggests that black men are born criminals, and no one calls them racists.
Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas. By the standards above, conservatives are accurate tagged, The Racist Right. They have gorged on race hatred like vampires on blood. They have grown fat, vicious, and drunk with it. Race hatred--the suggestion of it, the exploitation of it, the hint of it, the bold declaration of it-- is among their major calling cards and bait to a significant portion of their devotees.
George Bush speaks at Bob Jones, lending their racist policies his approval. Thus, George Bush traffics in race hatred. He is a racist. It's that simple. I will use the same standards of hate that the right uses against blacks, or any other cause they wish to suppress.
Jeb Bush seeks to suppress the constitutional rights of blacks to vote--no one else, just blacks. Thus, Jeb Bush traffics in race hatred. Jeb Bush is a racist.
Bill Bennett ignores one set of statistics for another in order to denigrate blacks. He traffics in race hatred. Bennett is a racist.
Any politician who, when asked, does not condemn Bennett's words, as any black politician would be asked to condemn Farrakhan's, agrees with Bennett's choice of one statistic over another, and therefore traffics in race hatred, and is a racist.
One standard for all.
King was Wrong: The Jewish Model
09/21/05 07:53 AM
THE RANTING DIES DOWN. The mists fade.
Storm one is dead and gone. We all had our chance
post-Katrina to hope for or hail the "new
conversation on race," or the revived interest in
the subject. And like all else in this America, it
had its 15 minutes, and now its "Exit stage left."
For whites, this doesn't matter in the least. They held bake sales, shucksed and awwwed to the images of desperate black faces on their TV screens. But their bake sales and their car washes and their donations means that they are good people, and good people are free from prejudice. It means they are fair people; Americans look after each other; Americans come together in times of crisis; United We Stand.
Tomorrow, they will look at our black skin with the same eyes with which they've looked at it for generations--tinged with an undercurrent of suspicion, with a faint whisper of shame for the hateful, bloody history about which our very skin screams.
America has had a tenuous relationship with its black citizens since its inception. We were slaves, not citizens, and then sub-citizens, and then second-class citizens. Now we hold a nebulous status. Our rights are guaranteed like those of any American, but our access to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is still often subtly denied. The landlord who won't rent to a "black accented" voice. The employer who trashes resumes with black-sounding names. The lenders who charge more for mortgages in black neighborhoods, etc., etc., etc. The doctors who ignore pain and symptoms in black patients that they actively treat in white ones.
Yet, despite this ambivalence on the part of America toward us, we have steadfastly remained believers in the American Dream--what I've referred to as "the perfectibility of whites." We have assumed that someday, they will begin to truly adhere to their high-minded words with equally high-minded actions.
We are still waiting.
Black Americans are an historically despised minority with no homeland, severed completely from indigenous cultures, and trained and educated by the majority that has heaped contempt on them for most of their history. This is unique. What has the majority taught us? That they are... well, "perfectible." That "and justice for all" is a fundamental truth, not a distant dream; that any diversion from that truth is aberration, not norm. That the Jesus handed to us to make our enslavement less troublesome for our former slave masters--that the blonde god Jesus demands that we forgive, and by inference, forget. They have told us that we are less than they--less intelligent, less worthy, less pretty.
And with no countervailing voice of our own, we have believed them.
Other groups come here with cultures intact, self-images nurtured in non-toxic atmospheres. Afro-Americans have 400 years of breathing toxic air to contend with. The cultural lung tissue that feeds our self-image has been scarred. The question for us in the coming century is: "How do we heal it?"
THE ANSWER
America has had a tenuous relationship with us since its inception. I believe it's necessary for us to return the favor. It is necessary to free ourselves from the training that tells us that justice for us is a norm to which America will undoubtedly return. In fact, full and equal justice for us is a vision that has never been realized. We must acknowledge that.
We must free ourselves from the civil rights movement idea that the majority can effortlessly, or organically achieve "colorblindness." This suggests that being an Afro-American means nothing more than skin color. This is what has allowed conservatives to use the civil rights movement rhetoric AGAINST civil rights for us. The civil rights movement insisted that we were "just like" white Americans, except black. Subtly embedded in this is the idea that there's something wrong with being "unlike."
However, we are "unlike." During the civil rights era we did not insist that to be Afro-American was to belong to a rich, distinct, glorious, tragic subculture. We had breathed toxic air too long to see and insist upon the acknowledgment of that distinction. We only acknowledged the tragedy. By the time we began to acknowledge our distinction, we were so poisoned by our American experience that we didn't look in the mirror to find our true Afro-American cultural selves, we looked back to a fantasy of African cultures from which we'd been severed for hundreds of years.
To insist on the perfectibility of Americans is to accept America's historical judgment of us. It is to deny the majority's humanity, and our own. Only it places them on the level of demigods, and us on the level of slaves.
We must free ourselves from their judgment, and stop waiting for them to achieve the perfection that they see in themselves and have taught us to see in them. We must take control of our own culture: fully identify it, codify it, and immerse ourselves in it as an antidote to the toxins to which we will undoubtedly be exposed for a long, long time.
And there is a constructive model that we can follow in doing so: the Jewish Model.
Growing up, I had a lot of Jewish friends, and "Hebrew school" was a norm for many. Once a week or so, they went to be taught the Hebrew language, and Jewish history and culture. It helped assure that young Jewish kids never forgot what had happened in the past--that they were armed with tools to see themselves clearly--and not others' distorted visions of them--to see their history through their own eyes. It gave them a sense of their great worth as Jews and the value of Jewishness.
Afro-Americans have created forms of music, dance, speech, art and worship which are ours. They are renown throughout the world. There is a reason Sunday mornings are the most segregated hours in America. It is because our view of God is distinct. Ours is decidedly fallible. You rarely hear black Christians screaming for a Creationist curriculum. We are not ones to suggest that societal norms and prejudices should be set in scriptural stone. There is a reason Afro-American music sounds like no other, and why some of this country's greatest orators have come from the Afro-American tradition. Black folk tales tell us how our own visions of magic and death evolved. Think Toni Morrison's "Beloved."
Once a week, black children should take a seat in a back room (of the local church for instance), where they would study a standardized curriculum geared toward their age group. They would hear about Frederick Douglass from black lips, read black and white narratives from this country’s slave past, hear Mahalia Jackson sing, read Gates’ “Colored People,” and learn what a saxophone means, and how jazz can stand as a central metaphor for our way of being in the world. They should read Zora Neale Hurston’s folk tales. They should learn Plessy v. Ferguson, not as dry history, but such that they feel where we come from in America, so they can openly express the rage it engenders and then channel that rage into building from the cultural wealth their forebears bequeathed.
MARTIN LUTHER KING WAS WRONG
Face it, Afro-America, the Great Man was Great, but wrong. He preached a dream. And his dream touched the hearts of white America because it flattered the American Christian notion of white American moral divinity. Americans could be made pure; America’s sins could be washed away. And we, black Americans, could do it. To many, though, it was just an offer to clean their moral toilets—much as we had cleaned their porcelain ones. King's genius and his tragedy, is that he made the civil rights movement about THEM.
30 yeas hence, are we willing to admit that "they" are just as human and prone to prejudice as any other human? Are we ready to admit, that they, being just human, will have to acknowledge that tendency toward prejudice and actively work to wean themselves from it? Can we admit that there is minimal interest among the majority of making that acknowledgment, and doing that work? As evidence of the latter, I point to books like "The Bell Curve," and the work of Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, which denies the existence of prejudice among whites. I point to the controversy that arose over the display of photographs of lynchings that toured various museums. I point to the fact that we're accused of "living in the past" when we acknowledge America's racist legacy, when contiguous or much older historical truths (WWII, the Civil War) are treated as living history.
If we're ready to admit this, we are ready to move forward, sans illusions that the majority will "come around" any time soon. We are ready to take command of our own self-image, acknowledge ourselves as cultural beings, teach ourselves that culture, and make it the foundation on which we stand as we master the mainstream culture such that we are competitive with any Americans of any color. Only we will have that much more to hold onto--a self-defined culture of our own.
I'M BETTER; YOU'RE EQUAL
No self-respecting culture on earth seeks "equality." They all insist on their superiority. Through Afro-American cultural self-education, black children would learn that their race not as a burden to be "owed" something, nor that automatically condemns them to intellectual and cultural deprivation. Armed with a sound foundation in the riches of Afro-American history, speech, letters, glory, worship, music, hurt and triumph, they will be able to compete in any circles they choose. They can then surmount remaining obstacles with the fiercely unapologetic arrogance and self-assurance of a people who made nothing less than a world from the seconds and scraps of a majority who never dreamt so much brutal beauty could be wrung from so little.
When this happens, we will finally no longer be the last to leave, and the first to suffer.
For whites, this doesn't matter in the least. They held bake sales, shucksed and awwwed to the images of desperate black faces on their TV screens. But their bake sales and their car washes and their donations means that they are good people, and good people are free from prejudice. It means they are fair people; Americans look after each other; Americans come together in times of crisis; United We Stand.
Tomorrow, they will look at our black skin with the same eyes with which they've looked at it for generations--tinged with an undercurrent of suspicion, with a faint whisper of shame for the hateful, bloody history about which our very skin screams.
America has had a tenuous relationship with its black citizens since its inception. We were slaves, not citizens, and then sub-citizens, and then second-class citizens. Now we hold a nebulous status. Our rights are guaranteed like those of any American, but our access to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is still often subtly denied. The landlord who won't rent to a "black accented" voice. The employer who trashes resumes with black-sounding names. The lenders who charge more for mortgages in black neighborhoods, etc., etc., etc. The doctors who ignore pain and symptoms in black patients that they actively treat in white ones.
Yet, despite this ambivalence on the part of America toward us, we have steadfastly remained believers in the American Dream--what I've referred to as "the perfectibility of whites." We have assumed that someday, they will begin to truly adhere to their high-minded words with equally high-minded actions.
We are still waiting.
Black Americans are an historically despised minority with no homeland, severed completely from indigenous cultures, and trained and educated by the majority that has heaped contempt on them for most of their history. This is unique. What has the majority taught us? That they are... well, "perfectible." That "and justice for all" is a fundamental truth, not a distant dream; that any diversion from that truth is aberration, not norm. That the Jesus handed to us to make our enslavement less troublesome for our former slave masters--that the blonde god Jesus demands that we forgive, and by inference, forget. They have told us that we are less than they--less intelligent, less worthy, less pretty.
And with no countervailing voice of our own, we have believed them.
Other groups come here with cultures intact, self-images nurtured in non-toxic atmospheres. Afro-Americans have 400 years of breathing toxic air to contend with. The cultural lung tissue that feeds our self-image has been scarred. The question for us in the coming century is: "How do we heal it?"
THE ANSWER
America has had a tenuous relationship with us since its inception. I believe it's necessary for us to return the favor. It is necessary to free ourselves from the training that tells us that justice for us is a norm to which America will undoubtedly return. In fact, full and equal justice for us is a vision that has never been realized. We must acknowledge that.
We must free ourselves from the civil rights movement idea that the majority can effortlessly, or organically achieve "colorblindness." This suggests that being an Afro-American means nothing more than skin color. This is what has allowed conservatives to use the civil rights movement rhetoric AGAINST civil rights for us. The civil rights movement insisted that we were "just like" white Americans, except black. Subtly embedded in this is the idea that there's something wrong with being "unlike."
However, we are "unlike." During the civil rights era we did not insist that to be Afro-American was to belong to a rich, distinct, glorious, tragic subculture. We had breathed toxic air too long to see and insist upon the acknowledgment of that distinction. We only acknowledged the tragedy. By the time we began to acknowledge our distinction, we were so poisoned by our American experience that we didn't look in the mirror to find our true Afro-American cultural selves, we looked back to a fantasy of African cultures from which we'd been severed for hundreds of years.
To insist on the perfectibility of Americans is to accept America's historical judgment of us. It is to deny the majority's humanity, and our own. Only it places them on the level of demigods, and us on the level of slaves.
We must free ourselves from their judgment, and stop waiting for them to achieve the perfection that they see in themselves and have taught us to see in them. We must take control of our own culture: fully identify it, codify it, and immerse ourselves in it as an antidote to the toxins to which we will undoubtedly be exposed for a long, long time.
And there is a constructive model that we can follow in doing so: the Jewish Model.
Growing up, I had a lot of Jewish friends, and "Hebrew school" was a norm for many. Once a week or so, they went to be taught the Hebrew language, and Jewish history and culture. It helped assure that young Jewish kids never forgot what had happened in the past--that they were armed with tools to see themselves clearly--and not others' distorted visions of them--to see their history through their own eyes. It gave them a sense of their great worth as Jews and the value of Jewishness.
Afro-Americans have created forms of music, dance, speech, art and worship which are ours. They are renown throughout the world. There is a reason Sunday mornings are the most segregated hours in America. It is because our view of God is distinct. Ours is decidedly fallible. You rarely hear black Christians screaming for a Creationist curriculum. We are not ones to suggest that societal norms and prejudices should be set in scriptural stone. There is a reason Afro-American music sounds like no other, and why some of this country's greatest orators have come from the Afro-American tradition. Black folk tales tell us how our own visions of magic and death evolved. Think Toni Morrison's "Beloved."
Once a week, black children should take a seat in a back room (of the local church for instance), where they would study a standardized curriculum geared toward their age group. They would hear about Frederick Douglass from black lips, read black and white narratives from this country’s slave past, hear Mahalia Jackson sing, read Gates’ “Colored People,” and learn what a saxophone means, and how jazz can stand as a central metaphor for our way of being in the world. They should read Zora Neale Hurston’s folk tales. They should learn Plessy v. Ferguson, not as dry history, but such that they feel where we come from in America, so they can openly express the rage it engenders and then channel that rage into building from the cultural wealth their forebears bequeathed.
MARTIN LUTHER KING WAS WRONG
Face it, Afro-America, the Great Man was Great, but wrong. He preached a dream. And his dream touched the hearts of white America because it flattered the American Christian notion of white American moral divinity. Americans could be made pure; America’s sins could be washed away. And we, black Americans, could do it. To many, though, it was just an offer to clean their moral toilets—much as we had cleaned their porcelain ones. King's genius and his tragedy, is that he made the civil rights movement about THEM.
30 yeas hence, are we willing to admit that "they" are just as human and prone to prejudice as any other human? Are we ready to admit, that they, being just human, will have to acknowledge that tendency toward prejudice and actively work to wean themselves from it? Can we admit that there is minimal interest among the majority of making that acknowledgment, and doing that work? As evidence of the latter, I point to books like "The Bell Curve," and the work of Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, which denies the existence of prejudice among whites. I point to the controversy that arose over the display of photographs of lynchings that toured various museums. I point to the fact that we're accused of "living in the past" when we acknowledge America's racist legacy, when contiguous or much older historical truths (WWII, the Civil War) are treated as living history.
If we're ready to admit this, we are ready to move forward, sans illusions that the majority will "come around" any time soon. We are ready to take command of our own self-image, acknowledge ourselves as cultural beings, teach ourselves that culture, and make it the foundation on which we stand as we master the mainstream culture such that we are competitive with any Americans of any color. Only we will have that much more to hold onto--a self-defined culture of our own.
I'M BETTER; YOU'RE EQUAL
No self-respecting culture on earth seeks "equality." They all insist on their superiority. Through Afro-American cultural self-education, black children would learn that their race not as a burden to be "owed" something, nor that automatically condemns them to intellectual and cultural deprivation. Armed with a sound foundation in the riches of Afro-American history, speech, letters, glory, worship, music, hurt and triumph, they will be able to compete in any circles they choose. They can then surmount remaining obstacles with the fiercely unapologetic arrogance and self-assurance of a people who made nothing less than a world from the seconds and scraps of a majority who never dreamt so much brutal beauty could be wrung from so little.
When this happens, we will finally no longer be the last to leave, and the first to suffer.
Black are Snakes; Whites are Spiders
09/18/05 09:16 AM
My
op-ed on race in the US post-Katrina appeared in
the Sunday, Sept. 18 LA Times "Current"
section. Available here.
Additional
Katrina entries below.
Fags and Witches
09/15/05 05:12 PM
Vox populi vox Dei—“The voice of the people is
the voice of God.” An extremely effective means of
inculcating absolute loyalty to a government “of
the people,” this principle also proved fatal to
persons—like Jews, gay people and “witches”—whose
life-styles differed from those of the majority: a
voice not in harmony with that of “the people” was
ipso facto out of harmony with God and hence
punishable.
- “Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality”, John Boswell
In its most desperate lurch back to the 15th century, the Catholic Church is engaging in an Inquisition against gays in US seminaries, according to an article in the New York Times. This has put the lie to the fine distinction on which Christian rightists have relied to shield themselves from accusations of rabid hate. This has nothing to do with hating the “sin” of homosexuality, but loving the “sinner.” The Church will be purging those “with strong homosexual tendencies.” (One assumes these will be identified by record collections, underwear styles, and the décor of rooms.) No. This is not hating the sin and loving the sinner. This is burning the sinner because he IS the sin.
This news sent me back to an extraordinary 1980 text by the late John Boswell, a professor of history at Yale. In his book “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,” he examines gay people in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the 14th century. He makes clear that religious belief and piety have little to do with hatred. He writes:
If… prohibitions which restrain a disliked minority are upheld in their most literal sense as absolutely inviolable while comparable precepts affecting the majority are relaxed or reinterpreted, one must suspect something other than religious belief as the motivating cause of the oppression.
You don’t see the Church purging straight men who may lust after women, though the Church prohibits heterosexual sex among its priests. The Church is only hunting gays. This, they will insist, is due to the biblical prohibitions and condemnations of homosexuality. However, Boswell’s exhaustive research—both textual and historical—thoroughly debunks any idea of biblical imprecations against gays. He exposes those in current Biblical texts as purposeful mistranslations of the originals, or metaphorical asides only tangentially associated with homosexuality.
It is, moreover, quite clear that nothing in the Bible would have categorically precluded homosexual relations among early Christians. In spite of misleading English translations which may imply the contrary, the word “ homosexual” does not occur in the Bible: no extant text or manuscript, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, or Aramaic, contains such a word. In fact none of these languages ever contained a word corresponding to the English “homosexual,” nor did any languages have such a term before the late nineteenth century.
For instance, discussing the famous quote from Leviticus, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. [18:22], Boswell explains that the word “toevah,” which is translated as “abomination” actually means that which is ritually unclean for Jews, like the shaving of one’s beard or having sex with a woman during menstruation. It is suggestive of a ritualistic differentiator between Jews and gentiles. No more a condemnation of homosexuality than of shaving.
He points out that the sins of Sodom were sins of “inhospitality,” not “homosexuality,” and that none of the Old Testament passages that refer to the wickedness of Sodom make any suggestion of homosexuality. Such associations were tacked on centuries later.
As for Paul’s writings that supposedly condemn gays, two refer not to gay sex, but “wonton” or “unrestrained” individuals. These, Paul says, will be denied entrance into the kingdom of heaven. As Boswell notes, “…to assume that either of these concepts necessarily applies to gay people is wholly gratuitous.”
Paul’s passage from Romans I:26-27 states “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise, also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.”
Here, Paul’s argument is about lack of fidelity, not sexuality. He is condemning those who turn their backs on their old ways. He is not condemning gays. In fact those he condemns are NOT gay. They have rejected their calling and abandoned their wives. He is not condemning their sexual acts, he is condemning their abandonment of their usual, natural order (being straight men) for one Paul finds less appealing. It is a metaphor for the Romans, who turned their backs on monotheism.
Boswell’s book will quickly convince the literate that there is no religious reasoning behind prejudice against gays. It comes back to the opening quote: “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” For a city-state determined to subordinate private rights for the public good (like the Church, or the America of right wing Christians), any voice not in concert with that of the majority is ungodly and inherently evil. Gays, Jews, Blacks, and women (as witches) have all taken our turns over the centuries.
The Church’s hatred toward gays has nothing to do with religion. The Church is seeking to squash that which it hates. The Church and those like it consider gay men, and gay sex, the ultimate expression of “untamedness.” Thus, they cannot believe that we live in stable relationships and make good parents. To them, freedom from the strictures of heterosexual marriage means chaos and licentiousness. If you’re straight, those bonds can be replaced by the bonds of the priesthood. If you’re gay, however, no bonds are strong enough. For no voice so different from theirs can be allowed to flourish.
American blacks have suffered similarly. Freedom from whiteness implied chaos and licentiousness. Black men were ravenous wolves out to devour white women—utterly lacking in self-control, and therefore evil. Black music corrupted good white teenagers; a voice so different from theirs… Black women “wanted it” from white men. As Boswell said, “a voice not in harmony with that of ‘the people’ was ipso facto out of harmony with God and hence punishable.”
Vox populi vox Dei—“The voice of the people is the voice of God.”
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the “people” have spoken.
- “Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality”, John Boswell
In its most desperate lurch back to the 15th century, the Catholic Church is engaging in an Inquisition against gays in US seminaries, according to an article in the New York Times. This has put the lie to the fine distinction on which Christian rightists have relied to shield themselves from accusations of rabid hate. This has nothing to do with hating the “sin” of homosexuality, but loving the “sinner.” The Church will be purging those “with strong homosexual tendencies.” (One assumes these will be identified by record collections, underwear styles, and the décor of rooms.) No. This is not hating the sin and loving the sinner. This is burning the sinner because he IS the sin.
This news sent me back to an extraordinary 1980 text by the late John Boswell, a professor of history at Yale. In his book “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,” he examines gay people in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the 14th century. He makes clear that religious belief and piety have little to do with hatred. He writes:
If… prohibitions which restrain a disliked minority are upheld in their most literal sense as absolutely inviolable while comparable precepts affecting the majority are relaxed or reinterpreted, one must suspect something other than religious belief as the motivating cause of the oppression.
You don’t see the Church purging straight men who may lust after women, though the Church prohibits heterosexual sex among its priests. The Church is only hunting gays. This, they will insist, is due to the biblical prohibitions and condemnations of homosexuality. However, Boswell’s exhaustive research—both textual and historical—thoroughly debunks any idea of biblical imprecations against gays. He exposes those in current Biblical texts as purposeful mistranslations of the originals, or metaphorical asides only tangentially associated with homosexuality.
It is, moreover, quite clear that nothing in the Bible would have categorically precluded homosexual relations among early Christians. In spite of misleading English translations which may imply the contrary, the word “ homosexual” does not occur in the Bible: no extant text or manuscript, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, or Aramaic, contains such a word. In fact none of these languages ever contained a word corresponding to the English “homosexual,” nor did any languages have such a term before the late nineteenth century.
For instance, discussing the famous quote from Leviticus, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. [18:22], Boswell explains that the word “toevah,” which is translated as “abomination” actually means that which is ritually unclean for Jews, like the shaving of one’s beard or having sex with a woman during menstruation. It is suggestive of a ritualistic differentiator between Jews and gentiles. No more a condemnation of homosexuality than of shaving.
He points out that the sins of Sodom were sins of “inhospitality,” not “homosexuality,” and that none of the Old Testament passages that refer to the wickedness of Sodom make any suggestion of homosexuality. Such associations were tacked on centuries later.
As for Paul’s writings that supposedly condemn gays, two refer not to gay sex, but “wonton” or “unrestrained” individuals. These, Paul says, will be denied entrance into the kingdom of heaven. As Boswell notes, “…to assume that either of these concepts necessarily applies to gay people is wholly gratuitous.”
Paul’s passage from Romans I:26-27 states “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise, also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.”
Here, Paul’s argument is about lack of fidelity, not sexuality. He is condemning those who turn their backs on their old ways. He is not condemning gays. In fact those he condemns are NOT gay. They have rejected their calling and abandoned their wives. He is not condemning their sexual acts, he is condemning their abandonment of their usual, natural order (being straight men) for one Paul finds less appealing. It is a metaphor for the Romans, who turned their backs on monotheism.
Boswell’s book will quickly convince the literate that there is no religious reasoning behind prejudice against gays. It comes back to the opening quote: “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” For a city-state determined to subordinate private rights for the public good (like the Church, or the America of right wing Christians), any voice not in concert with that of the majority is ungodly and inherently evil. Gays, Jews, Blacks, and women (as witches) have all taken our turns over the centuries.
The Church’s hatred toward gays has nothing to do with religion. The Church is seeking to squash that which it hates. The Church and those like it consider gay men, and gay sex, the ultimate expression of “untamedness.” Thus, they cannot believe that we live in stable relationships and make good parents. To them, freedom from the strictures of heterosexual marriage means chaos and licentiousness. If you’re straight, those bonds can be replaced by the bonds of the priesthood. If you’re gay, however, no bonds are strong enough. For no voice so different from theirs can be allowed to flourish.
American blacks have suffered similarly. Freedom from whiteness implied chaos and licentiousness. Black men were ravenous wolves out to devour white women—utterly lacking in self-control, and therefore evil. Black music corrupted good white teenagers; a voice so different from theirs… Black women “wanted it” from white men. As Boswell said, “a voice not in harmony with that of ‘the people’ was ipso facto out of harmony with God and hence punishable.”
Vox populi vox Dei—“The voice of the people is the voice of God.”
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the “people” have spoken.
Katrina's Deck Full of Race Cards
09/07/05 07:55 AM
The
first days were the most telling. Nobody mentioned
it. Tens of thousands of people trapped in
increasingly filthy conditions—free-flowing feces,
dead bodies lying about, grounds soaked in
urine—yet nobody mentioned that they were all
black. It was obvious to anyone with eyes. The
images made you squirm and cringe—hordes of black
faces pleading for help—life, food, water—in a
major American city. Yet nobody mentioned it. What
were they afraid of? Were they scared that the
right-wingers would accuse them of playing the race
card? Accuse them of suggesting that America had
not achieved the colorblind state of utopian bliss
that they insist it has; that white people and the
American society over which they hold sway are not
as perfectly just as they claim?
Even members of the congressional black caucus refused to “play the race card.” They focused on “class.” The fact that all the people of this particular class trapped in squalid hellholes filled with human waste happened to be black was oh, just… I don’t know… coinkydinky?
Like it or not America, hurricane Katrina blew a deck full of race cards in our faces. Let’s pick just a few of them up.
Ace of spades: Speaking on CNN, Wolf Blitzer clumsily, but correctly stated: so many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor and they are so black.” So black. These are not the gichy blacks—lighter skinned, with silkier hair—that long comprised New Orleans black middle and upper classes. These were the dark-skinned folk with nappy hair. Undeniably, thoroughly, discomfitingly black. New Orleans was a slave port. This quaint city, so charming, so southern, was the scene of crimes so base, viciousness so unadorned, it takes the breath away. Human chattel came through here. Women were taken, often raped by their white masters, and their lighter skinned children were accorded privileges above the common negroes. History lives. Racial history lives longer.
Queen of hearts: It just looked different when the cameras focus on white victims in Mississippi and when they focus on black ones in New Orleans. That will tell you how vibrantly, sensuously alive the subject of race remains in America. The white ones were picking up the pieces. The black ones carried the pieces in garbage bags slung over their shoulders. The white ones thought about rebuilding. The black ones had nothing on which to build. The coverage smacked of the local investigative report that uncovers a cruel puppy mill full of starved and diseased dogs. “Oh those poor black people.” Condescension threatened at every turn. It’s the same condescension with which we “open our hearts” to the victims of third world earthquakes, tsunamis and genocides. Condescension because we know that this could never happen to lighter-skinned, well-heeled folk. Such hell is reserved for “them”—the other—whomever they may be.
King of spades: My parents got out of New Orleans decades before Katrina, but for the same reasons that begat the tragedy. I lived there only briefly, but even as a child I knew that the attitude among the city’s poor, black population was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. My parents were 60s bourgeois strivers, and they insisted on three things: excellence to thwart the race hatred that threatened them, controlled rage to keep its memories fresh because more often than not, cultures die before they change, and finally arrogance in the knowledge that while the majority with all its power did its best to belittle us—they had failed.
Instead of this sustaining triumvirate, in New Orleans I saw hopelessness and resignation. There was about the people a sense that they would never get but crumbs from someone else’s plate. And to make this bitter pill palatable, they had only the Jesus that white people had thrust upon them hundreds of years ago with the express goal of making their ancestor’s enslavement less troublesome to maintain. Enslavement, Jim Crow, reeking prejudice, and then malignant neglect. Yes, history lives; and racial history lives longer.
Ace of Diamonds: Even conservatives are bashing Bush and his government’s and his personal response to this tragedy. Andrew Sullivan wrote:
Real conservatives believe that the state should do a few things that no one else can do – defense, decent public education, police, law and order among the most obvious – and leave the rest to individuals. Funding FEMA and having a superb civil defense are very much part of conservatism’s real core. It’s when government decides to reshape society, redistribute wealth, socially engineer, and take over functions that the private sector can do just as well that conservatives draw the line. The reason I’m mad as hell over Katrina is precisely because I’m a conservative and this kind of thing is exactly what government is for.
History lives. Modern conservatism was midwifed by resistance to the civil rights movement. Conservatives believed, as Sullivan states, that the government should not “socially engineer.” To many, that meant that if Mississippi wanted “whites only” bathrooms, it should have “whites only bathrooms.” For the government to interfere was “social engineering,”—not among its duties. However, if you’re willing to let someone rot and die quietly in poverty because of your ideological creed—die early from poor nutrition, poor and non-existent health care, then you’re willing to let them die in a flood. If poor people are dispensable under sunny skies, they’re dispensable in a storm. The right’s sudden concern over these peoples’ plight has nothing to do with their current living conditions. It has everything to do with conservative image management. A government controlled by white southerners oversaw a television spectacle that looked like an update from a slave ship. Their lies were exposed. Their attempt to quietly kill all mention of their society’s history of viciousness and race hatred and their part in it has failed. Overt paeans to segregation are no longer in vogue (except at select awards dinners for die-hards like Strom Thurman and Jesse Helms) but in promoting their creed of “hands off” government, conservatives deny history. They deny their willingness see the poor suffer and die under clear skies or cloudy. They deny racial history—their own racist history. And they do this because history smears dung on their vision of themselves, and America. But they’re learning the hard way that if we refuse to acknowledge the poisons in ourselves, in the culture, and address or “engineer” them, they fester. Soon there’s a riot, or a Superdome full of black people living amongst their own excrement with the whole world watching. And that’s what gets them now. It’s not the fact of the people suffering. They were perfectly happy to let poor black New Orleanians suffer in their ghettoed silence. It’s the fact of the world watching them suffer and tarnishing the image of the Last Empire.
The Joker: There he is, ladies and gentlemen. Grinning about sitting on Trent Lott’s porch once again. Telling us that he’ll give the situation more than one days’ attention. Gee, thanks, Your Highness. How big of him to walk amongst the common people, and even touch them, though some surely smelled bad. And Laura wore such a sensible suit. His Momma assures us that those Negroes holed up in Houston stadium are better off than they were at home. Yes, and the slaves were lucky to have been brought to the land of the free.
Bush didn’t dare go to the heart of New Orleans. Someone may have had the sense to spit.
Even members of the congressional black caucus refused to “play the race card.” They focused on “class.” The fact that all the people of this particular class trapped in squalid hellholes filled with human waste happened to be black was oh, just… I don’t know… coinkydinky?
Like it or not America, hurricane Katrina blew a deck full of race cards in our faces. Let’s pick just a few of them up.
Ace of spades: Speaking on CNN, Wolf Blitzer clumsily, but correctly stated: so many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor and they are so black.” So black. These are not the gichy blacks—lighter skinned, with silkier hair—that long comprised New Orleans black middle and upper classes. These were the dark-skinned folk with nappy hair. Undeniably, thoroughly, discomfitingly black. New Orleans was a slave port. This quaint city, so charming, so southern, was the scene of crimes so base, viciousness so unadorned, it takes the breath away. Human chattel came through here. Women were taken, often raped by their white masters, and their lighter skinned children were accorded privileges above the common negroes. History lives. Racial history lives longer.
Queen of hearts: It just looked different when the cameras focus on white victims in Mississippi and when they focus on black ones in New Orleans. That will tell you how vibrantly, sensuously alive the subject of race remains in America. The white ones were picking up the pieces. The black ones carried the pieces in garbage bags slung over their shoulders. The white ones thought about rebuilding. The black ones had nothing on which to build. The coverage smacked of the local investigative report that uncovers a cruel puppy mill full of starved and diseased dogs. “Oh those poor black people.” Condescension threatened at every turn. It’s the same condescension with which we “open our hearts” to the victims of third world earthquakes, tsunamis and genocides. Condescension because we know that this could never happen to lighter-skinned, well-heeled folk. Such hell is reserved for “them”—the other—whomever they may be.
King of spades: My parents got out of New Orleans decades before Katrina, but for the same reasons that begat the tragedy. I lived there only briefly, but even as a child I knew that the attitude among the city’s poor, black population was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. My parents were 60s bourgeois strivers, and they insisted on three things: excellence to thwart the race hatred that threatened them, controlled rage to keep its memories fresh because more often than not, cultures die before they change, and finally arrogance in the knowledge that while the majority with all its power did its best to belittle us—they had failed.
Instead of this sustaining triumvirate, in New Orleans I saw hopelessness and resignation. There was about the people a sense that they would never get but crumbs from someone else’s plate. And to make this bitter pill palatable, they had only the Jesus that white people had thrust upon them hundreds of years ago with the express goal of making their ancestor’s enslavement less troublesome to maintain. Enslavement, Jim Crow, reeking prejudice, and then malignant neglect. Yes, history lives; and racial history lives longer.
Ace of Diamonds: Even conservatives are bashing Bush and his government’s and his personal response to this tragedy. Andrew Sullivan wrote:
Real conservatives believe that the state should do a few things that no one else can do – defense, decent public education, police, law and order among the most obvious – and leave the rest to individuals. Funding FEMA and having a superb civil defense are very much part of conservatism’s real core. It’s when government decides to reshape society, redistribute wealth, socially engineer, and take over functions that the private sector can do just as well that conservatives draw the line. The reason I’m mad as hell over Katrina is precisely because I’m a conservative and this kind of thing is exactly what government is for.
History lives. Modern conservatism was midwifed by resistance to the civil rights movement. Conservatives believed, as Sullivan states, that the government should not “socially engineer.” To many, that meant that if Mississippi wanted “whites only” bathrooms, it should have “whites only bathrooms.” For the government to interfere was “social engineering,”—not among its duties. However, if you’re willing to let someone rot and die quietly in poverty because of your ideological creed—die early from poor nutrition, poor and non-existent health care, then you’re willing to let them die in a flood. If poor people are dispensable under sunny skies, they’re dispensable in a storm. The right’s sudden concern over these peoples’ plight has nothing to do with their current living conditions. It has everything to do with conservative image management. A government controlled by white southerners oversaw a television spectacle that looked like an update from a slave ship. Their lies were exposed. Their attempt to quietly kill all mention of their society’s history of viciousness and race hatred and their part in it has failed. Overt paeans to segregation are no longer in vogue (except at select awards dinners for die-hards like Strom Thurman and Jesse Helms) but in promoting their creed of “hands off” government, conservatives deny history. They deny their willingness see the poor suffer and die under clear skies or cloudy. They deny racial history—their own racist history. And they do this because history smears dung on their vision of themselves, and America. But they’re learning the hard way that if we refuse to acknowledge the poisons in ourselves, in the culture, and address or “engineer” them, they fester. Soon there’s a riot, or a Superdome full of black people living amongst their own excrement with the whole world watching. And that’s what gets them now. It’s not the fact of the people suffering. They were perfectly happy to let poor black New Orleanians suffer in their ghettoed silence. It’s the fact of the world watching them suffer and tarnishing the image of the Last Empire.
The Joker: There he is, ladies and gentlemen. Grinning about sitting on Trent Lott’s porch once again. Telling us that he’ll give the situation more than one days’ attention. Gee, thanks, Your Highness. How big of him to walk amongst the common people, and even touch them, though some surely smelled bad. And Laura wore such a sensible suit. His Momma assures us that those Negroes holed up in Houston stadium are better off than they were at home. Yes, and the slaves were lucky to have been brought to the land of the free.
Bush didn’t dare go to the heart of New Orleans. Someone may have had the sense to spit.
Last Mardi Gras in the City of New Orleans
09/02/05 10:08 AM
My
mother was born and raised in New Orleans. My
father was raised in Plaquemine, not far away. All
of their relatives lived there, and my Frenchified
name attests to the city's centrality to my
history.
I lived there only for a couple of years, and never learned to like it. I didn't see the New Orleans of the spring break frat boys on Bourbon Street or the quaint old buildings that reeked of southern gentility. I saw black New Orleans, a remnant of a slave past, a ghost of hatreds so rank and rampant that to this day they make you want to vomit.
Black New Orleans was segregated from the white. It was poor. And it too often wore a plantation-style mentality like a shroud. I was an army brat, raised in D.C., Germany, Maryland, Missouri. My parents were unapologetic 60s bourgeois strivers and pert-near psychotic in their insistence on three things: excellence to thwart the race hatred they saw all around them, controlled rage to keep the memories fresh, and arrogance in the knowledge that while the majority with all its power had done its best to dehumanize and belittle us--they had failed.
In New Orleans, I saw something completely different from the attitudes with which I was raised. Too often, blacks seemed to harbor hopelessness--belief that a shotgun in the ghetto was the best they could ever do until rescued from this vale of tears by Jesus. Where was the fight, I asked my young self? Where was the rage? They seemed downright frightened of white people.
But my parents had spared me the south's pre-civil rights viciousness, and offered me tools to counter it when it reared its head. So many of these folks -- exposed to nothing but that city's and that region's unrelenting brutality for generations -- had not been so blessed.
The Washington Post today reported a black woman in New Orleans saying, "To me, it just seems like black people are marked. We have so many troubles and problems."
Such words enrage me almost as much as a government that dares to dream of empire, yet is so incompetent it can't get water from point A to point B. They anger me almost as much as people who gleefully suffers a smirking, so-called leader with the arrogance and gall to lie bald-facedly before a TV camera that no one had anticipated what everyone in America knew--that Katrina could breach levees and flood the city.
Today, Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post quoted Donald Rumsfeld saying about Iraq, "while no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression."
I don't hear a lot of that understanding for the black people of New Orleans. They have no food, no water, but the National Guard has been given orders to shoot to kill if they see someone walking out of a store with a case of sustenance. Well, they're just nigger looters. Not people deserving of compassion. Not people with no food or water; not people with nothing but generations of nothing to lose behind them.
The novel Bourbon Street was my hate letter to that city and all it represents to me about the worst in this country and its past. Instead of a black character desperate for acceptance, or one who destroys himself due to the vagueries of trying to live in the majority's world, I wrote one who dared to learn the majority's lessons, and gain what he wanted even if he had to destroy their world to get it.
Watching thousands of poor, black people march aimlessly around that devastated city while its government all but ignores them, I say "All hail Alex Moreau."
I lived there only for a couple of years, and never learned to like it. I didn't see the New Orleans of the spring break frat boys on Bourbon Street or the quaint old buildings that reeked of southern gentility. I saw black New Orleans, a remnant of a slave past, a ghost of hatreds so rank and rampant that to this day they make you want to vomit.
Black New Orleans was segregated from the white. It was poor. And it too often wore a plantation-style mentality like a shroud. I was an army brat, raised in D.C., Germany, Maryland, Missouri. My parents were unapologetic 60s bourgeois strivers and pert-near psychotic in their insistence on three things: excellence to thwart the race hatred they saw all around them, controlled rage to keep the memories fresh, and arrogance in the knowledge that while the majority with all its power had done its best to dehumanize and belittle us--they had failed.
In New Orleans, I saw something completely different from the attitudes with which I was raised. Too often, blacks seemed to harbor hopelessness--belief that a shotgun in the ghetto was the best they could ever do until rescued from this vale of tears by Jesus. Where was the fight, I asked my young self? Where was the rage? They seemed downright frightened of white people.
But my parents had spared me the south's pre-civil rights viciousness, and offered me tools to counter it when it reared its head. So many of these folks -- exposed to nothing but that city's and that region's unrelenting brutality for generations -- had not been so blessed.
The Washington Post today reported a black woman in New Orleans saying, "To me, it just seems like black people are marked. We have so many troubles and problems."
Such words enrage me almost as much as a government that dares to dream of empire, yet is so incompetent it can't get water from point A to point B. They anger me almost as much as people who gleefully suffers a smirking, so-called leader with the arrogance and gall to lie bald-facedly before a TV camera that no one had anticipated what everyone in America knew--that Katrina could breach levees and flood the city.
Today, Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post quoted Donald Rumsfeld saying about Iraq, "while no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression."
I don't hear a lot of that understanding for the black people of New Orleans. They have no food, no water, but the National Guard has been given orders to shoot to kill if they see someone walking out of a store with a case of sustenance. Well, they're just nigger looters. Not people deserving of compassion. Not people with no food or water; not people with nothing but generations of nothing to lose behind them.
The novel Bourbon Street was my hate letter to that city and all it represents to me about the worst in this country and its past. Instead of a black character desperate for acceptance, or one who destroys himself due to the vagueries of trying to live in the majority's world, I wrote one who dared to learn the majority's lessons, and gain what he wanted even if he had to destroy their world to get it.
Watching thousands of poor, black people march aimlessly around that devastated city while its government all but ignores them, I say "All hail Alex Moreau."