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Steve Gilliard, 1964-2007
It is with tremendous sadness that we must convey the news that Steve Gilliard, editor and publisher of The News Blog, passed away June 2, 2007. He was 42.
To those who have come to trust The News Blog and its insightful, brash and unapologetic editorial tone, we have Steve to thank from the bottom of our hearts. Steve helped lead many discussions that mattered to all of us, and he tackled subjects and interest categories where others feared to tread.
Please keep Steve's friends and family in your thoughts and prayers.
Steve meant so much to us.
We will miss him terribly.
Jo Public: "JOE KLEIN on Obama and Sharpton"
Takes no guff
thanks to Jo Public for this good grab from Joe Klein's TIME blog - THANKS JO!
You know, being a white girl from Bensonhurst, I tend not to actively participate in discussions on race -- only because I know I'm not the most knowledgeable person on the subject. So in the past, when discussions would crop up here about, say, Barack Obama or Al Sharpton, I preferred to simply read what Steve, Lower Manhattanite and others have to say. I figured they're much better informed than I am, and if I shut up, I'll learn a thing or two. And I HAVE learned, and I appreciate it.
But those days are over. Everyone here can get outta the way. Because JOE KLEIN's on it.
link
Sharpton, obviously aggrieved by Obama's good press, says "Why shouldn't the black community ask questions? Are we now being told, 'You all just shut up?'"
No, just you, Al.
Well, I guess Sharpton has no choice but to shut up now. Because Joe Klein said he should. And what Joe Klein says, you know, matters and all.
- posted by Jo Public
LowerManhattanite: "Okay! It Happened! Get Over It! Uh . . . Not."
Somewhere In Hell, I Pray It’s Goin’ Down Like This
MAJOR THANKS to the incomparable LOWERMANHATTANITE for this kickass piece - THANKS LM!
“History is like herpes”, a professor once told me. “It just keeps coming back, reminding us of the initial contact and infuriating us every time it does. But son-of-a-bitch, it’s real. And if you don’t take care of it, and deal with it…well, you know the rest.”
In our relatively young country—by historical standards—we’ve come a long way, from trading pelts and trinkets for beaver overrun, Northeastern islands, to becoming the lone “mega-ultra-super-but-in-spite-of-all-that, f*cking-it-all-up” power in the world. And we’ve managed to compress a lot of history in our brief time millennially. We’ve squeezed in ten or so Goddamned wars, including one for independence—and excluding one involving a preciously described “peculiar institution” of ours. I exclude that “peculiar institution” driven one today, because that one, is our great national wound—and the maddeningly named “peculiar institution”—oh, f*ck it—Slavery Goddammit, is such a festering boil unto itself that it requires analysis beyond the war it fueled in large part.
The Rev. Al Sharpton has come to discover in recent days that in tracing his family’s lineage back a little, his antecedents may well have been—and it’s ugly even typing these words—chattel property of the slave-holding family of noted 20th century bigot, segregationist, and venerated Dixiecrat/GOP senator Strom Thurmond.
“And?”, say the usual punk-*ssed apologists and soft-core hate-mongers on the right. “Big whoop”, they whine. “It happened. Can you let it go? I mean, jeez! What dusky killjoys you people are! How are we supposed to move on and rag you n*ggers with “news-speak” language while slobbering over Beyoncé’s thighs if you keep harshing our myopic mellow with this bullsh*t?”
Well my little instaf*ckwits, cornerites and fellow travelers down that flaming cross-lined road to racial utopia, it ain’t quite that simple. You see, it would be easy as all hell to trot out the “it’s a Black thang, you wouldn’t understand” meme, but—sh*t. You know what? It’s actually apt for this, so yeah—“It is a Black thang, and too many of you really wouldn’t and quite honestly don’t wanna understand.” So lemme break it down. I don’t know Reverend Al—contrary to what many White folks may believe about how we all have each other’s e-mail addys—but I have a pretty good idea that finding out this ugly little bit of family history brought on a few sleepless nights for the permed, progressive preacher. You see, it’s a helluva thing for Black folks born here who have antecedents who were slaves. Our American history is a nasty one. “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock…Plymouth Rock landed on us”. I remember my 8th grade History class, which as luck would have it coincided with the first showing of “Roots” on television. My teacher, Dear Mr. G______ thought it would be cool to assign a class project of having us kids attempt to trace our history back towards our own “Roots”, if you will. It was a two-week long project spanning the week of ‘Roots’ broadcast, and the week thereafter. God bless Mr. G______, the man meant well, but the project was doomed to be a pigf*ck from jump. You see, when time came to present the assignments—replete with illustrated family trees, a brutal truth became apparent. The White kids in class were able to present large, multi-branched and dense-leaved sequoias of lineage, going back in some cases to the 1800s, with indications of residence and occupation as supporting information. The Black kids for the most part brought the equivalent of small, barren azaleas to the party. Missing and incomplete branches. Stunted roots as it were, for once we hit the blood, sweat and tear-stained wall of slavery in the research, the trail often went cold. I remember the collective pall that came over the class as it became evident that the project had gone down two very different paths for the two groups of students. It was depressing as f*ck. Kid after kid went up there with a mixture of shame and sadness in their delivery, as they sought to explain the odd, yet obviously minimal presentations they were able to mount. Once you got to great-grandparents, (and for those of us with older parents--grand-parents) the trails often grew cold, and there was little description of familial anecdotes and detail like occupations and migration with reasoning. The discomfort in the class was palpable, and it was only a couple of kids after my lame-*ss, brief and apologetic presentation that Mr. G prematurely ended the oral reports, opting to just collect the projects and grade them. He somberly apologized—for not “giving some of you as much time as you probably needed to do this project properly”, he said. But us Black kids understood what he meant. He regretted putting us in a f*cked up position like that where we’d discover—harshly, what damage slavery had wrought.
What damage slavery had wrought. Black folks don’t think about it every day. We work. We plod along through life like everybody. Pay the bills, Fret about the kids. But slavery is a stealthy mother-f*cker. It creeps up on you when you least expect it. You hear folks discuss their lineage in great detail and your mind cannot help but wander to where your lineage effectively wisps out into a vapor trail. And that point doesn’t take much of a journey to get to. You realize your American history is different from the revered and regaled ones of people you know. And different in an ugly, mean way that an outsider—a not-Black person can never really understand. It depresses you. If your life is hard, it can make you feel less American than a lot of folks. Sh*t, if your life is easy and people get too giddy about the depth of detail about Great-Great-Grams Mimsy and Durwood and their horse-drawn move from Ol’ Virginny to Sandusky in “ought four”, you often can’t help but feel a bit of second-class citizenship in the face of that. Your American experience is not pretty, charming or romantic. It’s truncated and abrupt. Not a tree, but a weed. A dandelion. A dandelion long ago blown upon, with its bits scattered the million different places the wind blows.
And when you do manage to break through that wall, if you’re of means and have the wherewithal to gather those historical dandelion scatterings to form a whole thing again, the odds are you’ll stumble onto a slap in the f*cking face like Rev. Al’s getting now. “Pyow! Right in the kisser!” It’s a helluva thing. You go through life and make your way, trying to succeed, pushing the thoughts of your history to the backmost part of your mind, because let’s face it—dwelling on your folks having been slaves is a bitch—and then, once you do dig around a bit, you hit a flaming gas pocket of America’s overt racist past like this. And it burns. Burns you right to the core. In Rev. Al’s case, the lineage going back to the Ol’, Ol’, Oldest of Ol’ Strom’s plantation is a true kick in the gut, but is ironic and instructive in a way. You get the mantra of “Hey! I got nothin’ to do with what happened then, so lighten up!” from those who would minimize slavery’s damage.. But the sad reality is that just like the roly-poly Rev didn’t have to scratch history too deep to find Ol’ Strom grinnin’ there with a whip, the odds are a lotta White folks wouldn’t have to scan too hard before finding a relative who benefited from slavery’s enforcement. It’s our collective wound, people. The historical nail bomb that’s pockmarked us all.. Beyond the issues of reparations, mules and acreage, we have to acknowledge the way slavery has bifurcated this country—beyond blue n’ gray, north and south, but yes, you’ve got it--to Black and White, while linking us all the same. And yes, I mean beyond the superficial, “get beyond it”, mock-dealing with it, people.
It’s there. It’s real. And in your face every day like the headlines that jump out at you from the newsstand, i.e.”Sharpton Descended From Slaves Owned By Thurmond Family”
It would appear, that irony is far from dead. And sadly, neither is slavery’s legacy.
- posted by LowerManhattanite
You're a fucking idiot
Labels: race, sharpton, wingnuttery
This could happen to you, John
John Ridley
It's a Hate Crime, So Where Are Jesse and Al? It was a fairly horrific scene. Long Beach, California: On a public street, in the dark of night on Halloween, a gang of about thirty youths beat three girls ages nineteen and twenty one. One of the girls was battered so severely she will require ongoing surgery to repair multiple fractures around her face and to reposition one of her eyes.
That there were taunts alluding to the girls' race and gender made the beating fall under the special circumstances of a crime motivated by hate.
The perpetrators were caught. The cops ID'ed nine of them as worthy of prosecution. Kids all. Thirteen to seventeen years of age when the crime was committed.
This past Friday eight of the nine were convicted, their sentences yet to be determined.
This story, beyond being sad for both the savagery of the crime and the youth of the offenders, also has a certain "through the looking glass" quality. In this hate crime the perps were black and the victims were white.
The far right soldiers of the Retro Guard will have you believe that the liberal concept of "hate crime" means that when people of color are the perpetrators the law overlooks the very concept of racial motivation.
Clearly that is not the case.
But the fact that blacks have been convicted for violence against whites is no cause in particular for documentation and certainly not celebration of this crime. Violence, and especially violence motivated by hatred of race or gender or religion or sexual orientation or merely the fact that the vic is "different" is deplorable.
Equally deplorable are those who pretend to stand for equality but who hypocritically allow such an injustice to pass without taking a stand against it.
So in the aftermath of this whole mess there is one thing that stands out to me: the conspicuous absence from the scene of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. How is it that these two men, these two supposed champions of racial justice who went into a fit of histrionics when Michael Richards went on his "nigger" rant, were nowhere to be found when actual racial hatred manifest itself.
The simple fact is, and this is no revelation but rather confirmation of what has been painfully obvious going on decades, neither Jesse nor Al are truly committed to any ideal higher than raising their own profile. To a degree, as with any public advocate, that's to be expected. It is a profile that gives one a platform from which to advance an agenda.
I wish this asshole would talk to the Bell family. Yeah, raising his profile by calling the NYPD murderers.
Where has John Ridley been on the Bell case? Has he had anything to say about the shooting of three unarmed men? Of course not. Because he wants to pretend that Sharpton is somehow off-limits and we can just rely on people like him who stand for nothing and no one.
Did the victims parents ask for Sharpton to come? Well, that's how he gets involved in these cases, they call him, not the other way around, They didn't. I would like Mr. Ridley explain to the police brutality victims how Sharpton is capitalizing on their names. When no one else would speak up for them, he did. But I guess that's too frightening for men like Ridley.
He wants quiet people, who say and do little, and make everyone happy. Then he can gin up an incident like an NYPD union official and ask where's Al?
Did it make you feel good to get all those pats on the head from the Huffington Post readers? Wish they could rub your head?
Let me explain something, John, and you need to understand this. If the police shoot you in the street like a dog, those HuffPo readers won't be there. All your pleasing commentary will be forgotten with "maybe he did something". But if one of your cousins call Sharpton, he'll show up and ask why the cops shot you.