Posted on 01/27/2005 12:03:46 PM PST by pissant
In those rare moments where I’m actually embarrassed, I have a standard quip that eases the burden: “I’m used to being embarrassed. I’m a black conservative.”
Well, it’s pull-the-paper-bag-down-over-my-head time again, courtesy of Ann Coulter, who for the purposes of this column is Miss Ann Coulter, and I give not a tinker’s dam whether she pardons the pun.
Coulter is the conservative author and columnist who can match wits and words with the best of them. She’s fairly good-looking, but she’s no Halle Berry (More on that later.)
I pondered whether I should pick up Coulter’s latest work — How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must) — when I saw it in a local bookstore recently. I’ll have to admit, I hesitated. As a black conservative, I do indeed have trouble talking to liberals. It’s almost as vexing as talking to white conservatives who are totally clueless on the matter of race.
In How To Talk To A Liberal, Coulter unleashes her inner clueless white girl, and lets her run buck wild for well over 300 pages. Oh, it’s not all bad. Her pieces on the 2000 presidential election, and how the U.S. Supreme Court got it right while the Florida Supreme Court got it wrong, are classic. So much for President George W. Bush “stealing” that election.
But on matters of race, Coulter couldn’t get a clue if it pimp slapped her.
“(Halle) Berry successfully mau-maued her way to a Best Actress Award … ” Coulter wrote of Berry’s winning the Oscar in 2002 for Monster’s Ball. Then, after that gratuitous bit of race-baiting, Coulter accused Berry of some race-baiting of her own to win the Oscar when the sultry actress pointed out — correctly — that black actors and actresses still have trouble getting some roles.
You see what’s going on here, don’t you? Coulter had no problem with Denzel Washington winning an Oscar the same year. His was “deserved,” according to Coulter. It was Berry — despite a near unanimous consensus that she did indeed turn in the best performance by an actress that year — who “mau-maued” her way to an Academy Award.
This is nothing but catty hater-ation. What bothers Coulter is not Berry’s “mau-mauing,” but the knowledge that she’ll never even come close to being as fine as Berry is. Memo to Miss Ann: put your claws back in, dear.
Coulter really got buck wild on the issue of the Confederate battle flag, which still bugs a lot of black folks. It doesn’t bug me as much. I’m more concerned that Coulter all but accused Berry of terrorism, probably the better to increase her street cred with the David Duke wing of American conservatives (How this slight escaped those black folks who vigilantly ferret out every offense to the race is beyond me.). But Coulter said enough things wrong in defending the Confederate battle flag that are worthy of correction.
“Man for man,” Coulter wrote, “the Confederate army was the greatest army the world had ever seen.”
That would actually be the Zulus under Shaka, and any military historian worthy of being called one would tell Coulter that.
Southerners fly the Confederate battle flag, Coulter contended, to commemorate their glorious military heritage, not because of racism. But then she slipped and let in a little truth.
“The Ku Klux Klan did not begin using the Confederate flag until the fifties,” Coulter wrote. That’s true, but the total truth is that it wasn’t just the KKK. Southern state legislatures, schools and plenty of non-KKK folks found new love for the Confederate battle flag in the 1950s. If Coulter wanted to be honest, she could have given the precise date.
May 17, 1954.
Yes, the Confederate battle flag flew highly and proudly after the Supreme Court ruled segregated schools unconstitutional. Wherever the forces of integration clashed with those of segregation there were good ol’ Bubbas waving the Confederate flag and yelling about how they’d die before they let nigger boys into their schools and rub up against white gals like, well, like Ann Coulter, for example.
That was the battle the neo-Confederates wanted to wage when their precious flag made its reappearance in the 1950s. It would be refreshingly honest if they — and Coulter — would simply admit that.
Thanks for reposting Ann's column. It was fun to read that masterpiece again. I agree with you - - Ann was (and remains) right on target. It cracks me up how all the "moderate" wimps and assorted fat chicks around here love to take swipes at Ann at any opportunity.
Regards,
LH
type Molon Labe into google if you like last stands.
Yes, ma'am.
Africans would have another opinion, but in America, she's black. Here, partial dominance is total dominance. Some black nationalists "back in the day" would consider her black but contaminated, whereas the upper crust of black society were light-skinned like her and would have accepted her and put down her detractors in the black community. In Jamaica, as a quadroon she'd be close to having her grandchildren become "statutory whites", if both she and her daughters and sons married white people. (The joker in the deck: was her one black grandparent 100% African by ancestry? How would you tell?)
The "one drop rule" is pretty much a Klan thing (a drop of blood is depicted at the crux of the crosses on their badges, and on their flag, which looks like an Austrian or Canadian flag with a device in the center); people with some black ancestry have always "passed", but it's usually been a subject of whispering and scandal in both communities.
All of the above said, it's been Spanish-speaking societies that have been the real parsers of genetic inheritance -- they gave us the word "quadroon", by way of New Orleans and the French-speaking islands -- and Spanish features literally dozens of words to reflect different admixtures of this or that ethnicity among the three major groups present in the New World: black, white, and Indian. Words familiar to us from other context were actually ethnic identifiers: cholo, cimarron, ladino, negro fino, tresalvo (same thing as cuarteron, which is our "quadroon", also called morisco), prieto, criollo, coyote, lobo, chino, mestizo, zambo, mulato, albino, and many more exotic admixtures were defined and used in baptismal documents to fix patrimony and a person's place in society. Which, by the way, was different in the social realm from what it was in the legal realm.
If this true (which I doubt) then he would be much better off spending his time writing of how Boxer, Kerry, Kennedy et al attacked Condi Rice.
Whoa...! Haven't seen you around here much lately.
Good to see you posting.
Regards,
LH
or Rourke's Drift.
or Knights of St John against our old foes on Malta 1565
or Camerone
or The Alamo
or Bastogne
or the last Vielle Garde Chassuers at Waterloo
history is rife with last stands...God bless em.
Actually, I have to give them credit for going against their liberal prejudices and attacking her on the substance of Bush's policy (even if they did it left-handedly -- wups, did I say that?). They focused on policy and philosophy differences and didn't cut her any slack because she's black. On the other hand, Condi wasn't too bad at mentioning the race thing in passing and representing a little bit to the white liberals. All in all, it wasn't a bad day at the office.
Whatever Halle Berry's talents may be, she made a complete ass of herself when she won that Oscar, changing my opinion of her from one of mere indifference to one of contempt. That, as happens with so many Hollywood types, pretty much negates anything she has to say from that point on, at least for me.
Pretty informative post. Technically Halle would be mulatto wouldn't she?
I knew whites in my homestate of Mississppi who were maybe 1/8th or less and passed in white society as a boy.
Not many but a few.
Halle would have been black down South and still would be as I assume she would be about anywhere... (the term down here is high yellow and is not meant as mean anymore than mulatto or albino etc)
a number of Southern women of that distinction have won beauty contests of late ....Miss Tennessee USA a few years ago from Columbia TN for example)
In Jamaica...a country with which I am intimately familiar...she would be Jamaican White if her family were moneyed.
And you shall.
We're looking forward to
visiting with you and Sweet Virginia.
Michael Medved, Accredited movie critic, stated after tho9se Academy Awards:
It was the year of the guilty conscious White Guy.
Her children, if she married a white person, would be quinteron or ochavado ("octoroon"), also called albino. If they in turn married other white people, their progeny would be salta atras' (literally, "jump backwards"), or 1/16th black -- in Jamaica, that was called "statutory white".
If she married an African, her children would be 3/8 white and 5/8 black, a combination not resolved by the lens of the Spanish record-keepers, and would probably be called, approximately, mulato or possibly negro fino if they were dark-skinned, the latter used of people who were 3/4 black. In the English-speaking Caribbean and the South, the equivalent word was "griff", from "griffin", which was used in India, however, to mean Europeans newly arrived from the home country.
You didn't like the casting of Cate Blanchett as Galadriel? I read the books when I was a teenager and I thought the cinematic Galadriel was very close to my image of her. Its interesting how differently people react to the movie and its casting (people who have read the books first that is). I thought most of the casting was really top-notch, I do think Orlando Bloom needed a few acting lessons before taking on Legolas. Sorry to go OT, but couldn't resist! Thanks for indulging me.
Really? Sounds like they've been lopping off a few decimal points. Extending the logic, in four more generations the only black people left in Jamaica will be Africans just off the boat.
Back in the day, she'd still be a couple of generations away from crossing over, but she herself would be pretty close to the center of "colored" society, which was composed of 1/2 to 1/8th or less African by ancestry. They ruled the roost on the non-white side of town; it was they who expelled Marcus Garvey for preaching racial solidarity.
Looks like I've got work to do! That's ok, I was obsessed with the 1900 Galveston Hurricane for the past couple of months and followed every bit of info I could google, ordered and read every book. Time for a new project, and you have provided it, war dad! I do love history. Thanks for the head start!
Thanks for the reply.
My reading of LotR circa 1968 is way too long ago for me to remember it. But don't get me wrong - - I didn't think Blanchett was bad. I just didn't find her convincing.
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