Being Black In America STILL Sucks

This past month, Ruminant has been uncharacteristically silent, missing at least three column deadlines—not at all like her: and this at a time when her birth-country is so noisily scandal-ridden and patently loony that her usually effortless and knee-jerk snarkiness should have been propelling her on, of its own massive momentum, to write gleefully malicious prose, paragraph upon paragraph.

But to what effect, I ask? To what effect? What can commentary add to "news" that is so transparently monstrous and mad that the only sane response is either 1) silence; or 2) going postal, in DC just for starters.

Instead, following the Michael Jackson Death Circus, La Palin's Final (We Think)Withdrawal From The Pageant That Is Her Personal Alternative Universe, The Continuing Shenanigans Of Bad, Mad, Thinking-With-Their-Reproductive-Organs White Republican Boys in DC (All Paying Members of that notorious C-Street Frat-House, Sigma Kappa Upsilon Mu, or SKUM). . .I've been, instead, rendered mute. (And I haven't even MENTIONED the so-called Democrats in the House and Senate blocking Health Care Reform, the Rabbis and Mayors et al Recently Arrested in New Jersey, nor the ongoing idiocy-in-installments of Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, Joe Scarborough and Fox "News," just to name a few of the usual culprits-of-crap, all of which should lay obvious, raucous claims on a rabid-left-wing-columnist's time and conscience. SOMEONE has to write about this stuff, this madness, this America-of-Ours, I've always thought, and yet . . .I've been utterly remiss of late.

SKUM Overload, I opine. Despair over "Popular Culture" as it is known and lived in these United States. A mute desire to head out for the wilderness, where I would never again have to listen to Governor Mark Sanford waxing forth about his Argentinian Soul-Mate (oh, give me a break!), or The (C-Street) Family advancing a philosophy that somehow, guiltlessly, conflates fascism with Christianity. Even Lou Dobbs, always teetering, has gone firmly and finally round the bend. Yes, with The Birthers? That group of gormless jackasses who can't parse a birth certificate? What should I say about THEM? What mere words are up to the task of smacking down all the idiots in this Republic?

I'm not up to this right now, folks. DANTE might not have been up to it. He'd have run out of circles of hell before getting halfway from A to D. (Of course, Cheney would require his own personal circle. As would Karl Rove. Still! And John Ensign and Mark Sanford are bucking for a duplex in Dante's Lower-Circle-of-Fun: adjoining master bedrooms with a shared, en-suite fire-pit might do it.)

Hiking the Appalachian Trail, my ass! I only wish the dog had eaten Sanford's homework while he was out there woodshedding.

So, I've been on the sidelines of late, quietly watching the various long- and short-running plays—both comedies and tragedies—on the world's many stages.

And then came the Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. story, out of bucolic Cambridge, Massachusetts. A Harvard professor gets hauled off in handcuffs for "breaking into" his own residence, even after displaying two forms of I.D. to the arresting officer. President Obama, commenting later, says (quite rightly) that the police "acted stupidly". . .and then, days later, does an about-face, and says he could "have calibrated those words differently."

Had Sergeant James Crowley come into my rural residence (were I still living in South Carolina), without being invited, and tried to haul me off in handcuffs for jimmying my own door open, he would have been dealing with not some sort of verbal "overreaction" (President Obama's words), but, rather, with Smith & Wesson. (I lived waaaaayyyy out in the Oconee County woods, and had to fire my shotgun off into the night sky on many occasions to discourage predations by two-legged varmints.)

Now, I understand, Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley have been invited to the White House to sit down and chat amicably over a brewskie. Were I Professor Gates, I'd be waterboarding Sgt. Crowley with my Sam Addams.

The bottom line is: it still sucks being Black in America, and I suspect it's going to suck for quite a long time to come.

Now, true, I'm an uppity, lippy white woman of a certain age. I've even talked back to the Teaneck police, on occasion, when I felt they were being unnecessarily heavy-handed in the course of issuing a traffic ticket (to my husband) for double-parking outside Louie's Charcoal Pit for precisely two minutes while I dropped off medicine for a sick child. Did me (and Dean) a lot of good: the ticket got written because I got lippy. But, Oh Lord help me, what if I'd been Black and lippy? I can tell you "what if." I'd have been given a second ticket, at the very least, for disorderly conduct.

Now, I also admit, as a child of the 1960s Mini-Revolution in this country, I have stood on ramparts and been tear-gassed while protesting the Vietnam War and calling the Athens, Georgia police who were gassing me "porcine." They were porcine, and they should have been on our side of the line of fire, the right side of history. Post-Kent-State, it was pretty obvious that law enforcement was not batting for the angels in America and, though I've taken citizens' classes in police procedures, and generally got along well with my small-town police force in Pendleton, South Carolina, in Teaneck and, obviously, Cambridge, there's still a great big old problem between the (mostly) men in blue, and those they've sworn to serve and protect.

And, if you happen to be Black, or Latino, or somehow obviously mentally impaired, you're likely to have an even bigger great big old problem with the police.

Reportedly, Professor Gates said to Sergeant Crowley, "I'll speak with your mama outside" (NYT, Vol. CLVIII, No. 54,747, Page 1). Right On, Professor Gates! And right on into those handcuffs, alas. . . .

It was not Professor Gates who overreacted, or Sergeant Crowley who needed his feathers smoothed.

It was, instead, an opportunity for the First Black Man In The White House to say, "Enough!" and it was the police, all across America, who needed to be told. Along with their mamas.

Being Black In America STILL Sucks

Let's see . . . you can interpret the Bible literally and jump and holler like hillbilly snake-handlers at your church services and not be made fun of by liberals . . .

You can speak ultra-Southern substandard dialects of English and not be made fun of by liberals . . .

You can claim to be the "culture-creating 'aryans' who invented zifilization" and be a goose-stepping, (racial) flag-waving, nationalistic super-(racial)patriot and not be considered a right winger (by liberals) . . .

Sounds like a pretty sweet deal, actually. How do I get in on it?

Does anyone think there is any other place where being black is more fun?

Zimbabwe! It's tons of fun to be Black in Zimbabwe. The folks just spent the past generation making Zimbabwe as Black as they could. What fun.

Nah. Turns out Mugabe is an "uncle tom" who isn't "down" with his homosexual brothers and sisters. "Real" Blacks are pro-gay, pro-abortion, and have the "theological" works of Rudolph Bultmann memorized by the time they're twelve.

so how come those Haitian boat people have joined in and started businesses and joined our money system? They’re black. How come they come over here with job skills? Isn’t Haiti the poorest country in the west?

You don’t hear a lot about how “the man” is keeping them down. I wonder why...........

From Keith Richburg's article "American in Africa" (Part 1 and Part 2, with an even more expanded treatment in his book Out of America : A Black Man Confronts Africa):

Somewhere, sometime, maybe 400 years ago, an ancestor of mine whose name I'll never know was shackled in leg irons, kept in a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal, and then put with thousands of other Africans into the crowded, filthy cargo hold of a ship for the long and treacherous journey across the Atlantic. Many of them died along the way, of disease, of hunger. But my ancestor survived, maybe because he was strong, maybe stubborn enough to want to live, or maybe just lucky. He was ripped away from his country and his family, forced into slavery somewhere in the Caribbean. Then one of his descendants somehow made it up to South Carolina, and one of those descendants, my father, made it to Detroit during the Second World War, and there I was born, 36 years ago. And if that original ancestor hadn't been forced to make that horrific voyage, I would not have been standing there that day on the Rusumo Falls bridge, a journalist -- a mere spectator -- watching the bodies glide past me like river logs. No, I might have instead been one of them -- or have met some similarly anonymous fate in any one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor made that voyage.

Yes, there are disadvantages to being black and, yes, racism still exists in the United States but the truth is that it's not really better anyplace else and African Americans would do even better if they embraced their country instead of fighting it because that's exactly what Caribbean and African immigrants are doing, skipping right over African Americans in the process.

Liberal hash. Jealousy that others have worked hard for what they have. Jealous that others have a real college degree not in some kind of “studies” for having taken too many electives in college. Jealous that others are happy with their lives. Jealousy of women who have a happy family, are able to work and care for their kids, and have a loving husband who knows who his ‘soul-mate’ really is. Jealousy of the white men who resemble the Founding Fathers in tenor and title and who donate money and time for charitable causes.

Liberals have to complain. They got their president. Yet they still complain.

They complain about poor people but they don’t volunteer to help them unless they get some kind of press or award for doing it. They don’t donate much to various causes. They spend hours memorizing Saul Alinsky’s Rules but can’t quote the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence or the Pledge of Allegiance.

Liberals live in a world of fear. They’re afraid of guns, afraid of Pit Bulls, afraid of being alone. They’re constantly angry and have sour faces.

That’s all.

Listening to O’Reilly and SoPovLawCtr guy talk about Lou Dobbs. What jerks these attorneys are. They think they’re gods and must be obeyed because??? Wonder how much 0bama ‘donated’ to SoPovLawCtr for their input about the Birthers?

Hehehehehehehe. It isn’t going away, 0bama, not now, not until you show us the long form and your college transcripts.

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