I was sad to see Spitzer go, but I was still excited about you in office. I didn’t know much about you, but I have to admit the black and blind thing made you kind of interesting. My thoughts–a man with that much handicap must be good or at least have some progressive ideas. Spitzer had ideas too, some that could have helped us avert the whole crazy Wall Street thing, but he also had hos. And we all know, hookers and politics don’t mix well.

So alas, it was your turn. And I was desperate for you to prove yourself. Even said “ha” to all the naysayers when you and your wife emerged to admit to extramarital affairs. Can’t get ‘em now, I said as I was dumb to think the only things tripping up politicians were camera women and interns. Anyway, a blind black man and his cheating wife. This is gonna be good and for a short time–it was. You scored major points with your support of stem cell research and I heard gay people weeping when you proposed a gay marriage bill. You were hitting all the right buttons and then you started slipping. Getting crushed actually, by that big ass budget deficit. So you thought, let’s just charge four percent on everything from music downloads to sleeping outside (camping). Of course, there was the 18% soda tax aka the “obesity tax” that has yet to be approved. Read more »

Despite all the recent news stories of well-intentioned whites bombarding American borders with black babies--colored children are not in high demand. They are not, as celebrity child-collectors would have you believe, the next big thing. Instead, they are in America and abroad, getting their asses kicked by hunger, by poverty, by disease, by parent-less homes, by poor education, by mass incarceration, and by violence. And they are angry. Look at this website! Hell, look at the photo I put up there. Do you see that girl’s face?

Recently in Atlanta, aka America’s next Detroit, a series of billboards proclaiming “Black Children Are an Endangered Species” made their debut across the city. Since then, public opinion has vacillated between abortion of blacks as a form of genocide to it’s a woman’s right to choose. Ryan Bomberger, the black guy at the beginning of this video believes the former. And judging by the testosterone heavy anti-abortion rallies, the hecklers, and the Scott Roeder’s of the world, most men believe they have a dog in this fight. They don’t. Hence, it would make more sense for Mr. Bomberger to send his wife, who heads the Radiance Foundation to make the argument against black abortion. But news flash--she ain’t a sista!

Long before arguments for building up the black population as a political strategy, white supremacists (nationalists) from Hitler to David Duke (Grand Wizard) sought to keep the white race pure by only breeding with their own. Beyond their sexual ideologies, they took it a step further and actively sought to intimidate and exterminate people of color and minorities via the Holocaust and the KKK. Margaret Sanger, a birth control activist also touted contraception as a way to control populations but how much progress would she have made without W.E.B. DuBois? The “Endangered Species” ad plays off this history and then haphazardly points to the ethnicity of its producers to assuage people’s negative reactions. Relax, a black person produced this.

But DuBois wasn’t all that black and neither is Bomberger. And yes, I’m going to make the same color argument I’ve been making--skin color matters. It is the primary reason Bomberger is at liberty to make suggestions about black behaviors while he continues to live as far away from the margins as possible. His own multicultural upbringing may have made him appreciative of diversity, but it has done little to make him sensitive to the differences that confront the racial minorities of melting pot families. Thus while I can look at Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitts’ brood and think what a wonderful experience it must be to create your own little home of equality, at the end of the day, I know better. Bomberger doesn’t.

Love is not all we need. At least not all of us. For every Haitian child pulled from the rubble by a concerned citizen another black child awaits adoption in America. Judging by the trends, this child will continue to wait as the number of black adoptions continue to decline. Black children are not only aborted because their parents don’t want them--no one does. If they do happen to get here, they are more likely to live on the streets, more likely to drop out of school, more likely to go to jail, and more likely to end up on death row. Seems to me, abortion or not, extinction is imminent.

It would probably tell you that John Mayer’s dick is one smart peen. Of course, our genitals don’t talk nor do they think, but ahem, have you seen the STD rates in the black community? We all make decisions about who we sleep with. Sometimes it is based on race, on size, on stature, and sometimes we blame it on the alcohol. Some of our decisions are not so thought out and some are rather intentional. When’s the last time you had sex with a homeless person?

I know I’m going to get killed for this post, but why is it racist when people don’t want to sleep with black folk, but sophisticated nationalism and community preservation when black folks stick to their own? Beyond that, why do black people take so much offense when people don’t want to have sex with them and then get mad when they are only seen as sex objects. Is there a safe middle ground? A one to one ratio on hip hop video hos and Michelle Obama-J. Crew imagery? Read more »

A short while ago I wrote about Tiger Woods’ fall from mixed-race grace. The same tumble Obama is currently taking. They are both–Barack and Tiger, two wildly popular individuals in powerful positions, in white male dominated fields–politics and golf. If only I could say the similarities ended there.

In my first column about Tiger Woods I wrote a bit about the implications of his transgressions and his text messages which suggested he was just another hyper-sexed black man. Pimp picture at Australian Open. Fair enough. Pimps have women and Tiger had about eight of them. However, the depiction of black men as pimps and abusers of women is thrown around far too often for its use to go completely under the radar. Even in Tiger Woods’ case where it seems an appropriate connotation, I can’t help but view it as code for black man–a new angle to shed light on his true colors. Pun intended. Read more »

I am a gay person who isn’t that invested in securing a lot of rights it seems most other gay folk want. I don’t really believe in marriage and outside a couple of school fights growing up (not related to my sexuality) I’m not a fan of war, so access to the armed forces isn’t in my top five. Quite often when I see gays marching for equality around marriage, I want to remind them of the old saying–”equal does not mean the same.” Perhaps domestic partnership is as far as this one will go. Or maybe all is not lost.

As for marriage and military, plenty of dollars are lost due to discrimination. Soon enough America will learn, the claim to Christianity is costly. With the economy struggling the way it is, it would behoove everyone to put the equality rhetoric in the backseat and focus on something a bit more universally sought–the mighty dollar. Gay marriage would save struggling states from financial ruin. Ask Massachusetts, they’ve seen over $110 million dollars in spending on gay marriage since the ban was lifted. Estimates for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell are much higher, with the government spending an additional $363 million to recruit and train new soldiers after gay ones were dismissed. A figure believed to be much higher once one takes into account the intellectual capital lost. Read more »

“How my dick ta’te?” –Tiger Woods (GQ, 1997)

There is an old Lil’ Rascals joke. Darla, Spanky, and Buckwheat are learning new words. The assignment asks them to use each word in a sentence. Darla and Spanky, two of the white characters get the words love and respect. Buckwheat, the sole black character gets the word dictate and in his sentence he asks, “How my dick ta’te?” In 1997, while interviewing with GQ magazine, a then 21 year old Tiger Woods told this joke to a group of women. This month, GQ re-released the interview in response to the current allegations of infidelity against Tiger Woods. They. Saw. This. Coming. Read more »

Like Che printed t-shirts and Darfur doo-rags, tragedy has become fashionable. It isn’t rare that I find someone trading stories (with great excitement) about a friend of a friend who was in Indonesia during the tsunami, or meet an artist eager to proclaim that he lost everything in New Orleans. Surely, a life of meaning must have been filled with unbelievable obstacles. If you spit lyrics, you must have bit the bullet (literally) at some point, right? Well, if not…did you almost die some way? Why do you think Kanye West is still rapping about his car crash?

Rappers are some of America’s earliest poverty-pimps, doling out pain and suffering long after they can pay bills. But rap artists aren’t the only people making a pretty penny off popular pities. Reality television has become the great distributor of everyone’s story, for better or worse. We can watch obese people cry over food, older women bed younger men, unattractive people get new faces, and burdened parents struggle with troubled children. The is The Biggest Loser, The Cougar, Extreme Makeover, and The Nanny.

Beyond reality television, there is Facebook, twitter, blogs, and i-reports. As a result, the democratization of news has created a culture of entitlement, where people not only hope, but believe their individual stories are important. And when pop culture themes suggest otherwise, people go to great lengths to swing the spotlight to their side. They crash acceptance speeches and White House parties and build mysterious saucers to fake-launch their six year-olds. And we return, ad-nauseum, to the same opportunity for uplift where people fight to surmount unbelievable obstacles. With media along for the ride, who is left to interrogate how we all got to this new reality in the first place? Who bears the responsibility of separating fantasy from the real world’s many harsh realities?

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire is a film about an obese, sixteen year-old black girl growing up in Harlem. She is illiterate, has a really mean mama who beats, rapes, and berates her. She has two children by her father, who also infected her with HIV. Think Color Purple. After getting kicked out of junior high for being pregnant (and not for being too damned old) she arrives at an alternative school where she makes friends with other disadvantaged colored youth and finds herself by reading and writing. Think Lean on Me. Read more »

In August of this year the critically acclaimed sci-fi thriller District 9 debuted, boasting an exotic location, foreign languages, and blacks and whites united against a common threat—Prawns.  The Prawns are aliens whose intergalactic automobile (most likely a Ford) has broken down on the wrong side of town—just above Johannesburg.  Depicted as scary and aggressive, the tall, physically variant, language deprived aliens are nothing like your typical shaky-voiced, thin-skinned, shiny-fingered E.T.

Twenty years later, having been dumped intopredominately black neighborhoods, we find the Prawns ravaged by poverty, segregation, and strung out on cat food.  There you have it—1980’s Harlem.   Mounting tensions between blacks and Prawns finally result in a massive eviction.  24-hours notice!  And surprise, this time it ain’t the colored-folk getting tossed.  Instead, the prawns suffer the same fate of many South Africans who were forcibly removed from their homes in Cape Town’s District 6 during the apartheid era and were relocated to more restrictive, less-integrated areas.

To the movie’s credit, the Ninth Ward, oops, I mean District 9, displays all the major symptoms of poverty and racism (speciesism)—prostitution, drug abuse, weapons dealing, and a powerful-despite-being-physically-handicapped drug lord. Plus, to keep it all in check we have an aggressive state, secret scientific experimentation, corrupt government officials, and an unsuspecting-do-gooder-white-guy with his feeble Negro companion (who is either perpetually confused or suffering from a speech impediment akin to stuttering).  Cliché?  Check!

While many critics have lauded the film’s alien-style apartheid, many Nigerians have protested the sci-fi depiction as racist.  District 9 shows them in typical black form—hyper-sexed, corrupt, voodoo masters, eye-rolling, mid-trance cannibals who eat aliens in an attempt to gain special powers.  In short, they are drug addicts as well.  Racist?  You betcha!  But hey, poverty and racism are f’d up—even as told in allegories.  Always inherent in the depiction of people of color are white conglomerates with the power and resources to both tell and sell stories.  Along the way they are helped by apolitical impoverished people of color who have less important things on their minds.  Besides, so much emphasis is placed on “non-human” activity in the film that little attention is given to the already battered black areas where Prawns were forced to live in the first place.  Albeit, there are no blatant propaganda signs declaring “white’s only” but there might as well be—these are clearly defined black areas.  The Prawns aren’t being removed from the Upper West Side—their homes look much more like the South Bronx in the Reagan Era.

From a story-telling standpoint, District 9 seems to have bitten off more than it can chew, however the film does manage to get one thing across—mixed race is the saving grace.  When the film’s human protagonist undergoes a metamorphosis, this half Prawn, half white-man sparks the revolution. 
But why couldn’t the Prawns mix with Nigerians?  I’m sure one of the prostitutes forgot to take her pill.  And what about blacks uniting with the aliens to fight the evil MNU (LAPD, NYPD, CPD) squad?  Of course hyper-sexed, cannibal Nigerians were offensive, but I’m more offended by their complete lack of altruism, their single-mindedness, and by the fact that the only character who seemed to show any empathy was an unsuspecting white man whose accidental mixing sparked a potential revolution.  In the end, we are left with an alien (who’s really a simple white guy), the feeble Negro-turned-political-prisoner, and the widow who upon receiving the flower from her husband-turned-Prawn gave me visions of Mr. and Mrs. Loving.  And there you have it folks—the sci-fi anti “one drop rule”, la raza cosmica sans black folk.  That’s the real racism.