So, in case anyone hasn't noticed yet, I have a new section (at my personal blog The Mustard Seed) in my right-side column. It's my podcast section. All you guys need ta do is just click on the pics to get where you wanna go. I update my music and news podcasts once a week.
I just got the book by Chip Smith. The Cost of Privilege: Taking On the System of White Supremacy and Racism. Once I finish it (which might take a while as I'm reading Capital, Vol. I by Marx) I'm gonna write a review.We are trying to get a sense of white racial privileges - distinct from the surplus taken by the white ruling class through exploitation. To do so, we want to focus as much as possible on differences within the broad working class. As described in earlier chapters, the white owning class in the United States exploits both white workers and workers of color. At the same time, the system affords white workers certain racial privileges that they have often jealously defended despite their exploitation. The white ruling class exploits both white workers and workers of color - and uses racial privileges to sustain their rule. White workers benefit - in comparison to workers of color - while at the same time being exploited for their labor power. This distinction is crucial. It points to the fact that ending exploitation - and the system of racial privileges that support it - is in the interests of white working class people as well as people of color. (italics are Smith's, bold mine)
In order to truly take up true class consciousness, in order to shed the oppressive bourgeois mindset that paralyzes many workers (especially many workers at my job who would rather support management than the union), a white worker must shed her or his whiteness and all privileges that come with it (or, perhaps, a more appropriate term would be reject).
Which reminds me. If any of you can find it out there, the book (out of print) Settlers: The Myth of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai would be a good complementary read along with The Cost of Privilege. (Some Marxists and anti-racists take issue with Sakai's analysis, some even call Sakai slightly mad, but hey, good read and informative).
If, in order to be elected, a man of color has to pander to white folks, in ways that no white politician would ever have to do to people who were black or brown, then white privilege and white power remain operative realities.
According to Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, “regular folks” = “white folks”. Chris Matthews isn’t even trying to be covert anymore. He’s just outright saying that whiteness is “regular”. Unbelievable. The stench of white privilege is emanating from the video. Whiteness is “regular”. Whiteness is “normal“. That’s what he’s saying.
According to a report by activist site Toward Freedom, for the past decade the search for a rare metal necessary in the manufacturing of Sony's Playstation 2 game console has fueled a brutal conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
...the demand for coltan prompted Rwandan military groups and western mining companies to plunder hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the rare metal, often by forcing prisoners-of-war and even children to work in the country's coltan mines.
Every day millions of children are forced to crawl into underground mines on their hands and knees to dig for the essential raw material, coltan, to make electronic gadgets like cell phones, iPods, laptop computers, play stations, wireless systems, DVD players, blackberries and pagers possible.
These technologically advanced toys are given life from capacitors, which are made from coltan, dug up from dangerous mines by children, under age 10.
The illegal trafficking of coltan in the Congo, has made thousands of children labourers. They work from sunrise to after dark digging with their calloused little hands into the earth to remove the raw material to be traded on the black market for US $400 a pound.
When Chin writes that Ku’s schtick is “to playfully undermine Korean stereotypes”, it’s not immediately clear how these stereotypes are exactly “undermined” by her performance. The trouble is, she traffics in the most exhausted and obvious stereotypes, in chopsticks and slant eyes. That is, it’s not the kind of humor that comes from acute observation, or a comedy animated by outrage, but a stand-up routine that’s little more than a superficial enumeration of cliches, strung together without rhythm. Which does not comedy make.Check out his blog and check out the rest of the article.
So why has the The New Yorkers’ cover art coming under heavy criticism when it simply is poking fun at all the right-wing racist attacks against the Obamas? Attacks which the Obama campaign had to create their own website to defend themselves from the campaign. They’ve had to tell you his father wasn’t a Muslim, he was an Atheist. That he, himself, didn’t go to a Madrassa. He threw his pastor under the boss for the sake of appearance, had to to denounce Louis Farrakhan, had to tell Black fathers in Bill Cosby-esque “get-your-shit-together” patriarchal uncle tom tone to be personally responsible just to seek the approval of white America. The reason why the Obama camp is trying to squash The New Yorker cover article is to really get rid of race from the agenda of discussion in this campaign altogether. Obama doesn’t want race brought up, and he sees it as only a harmful element in his campaign. So rather than dealing with race and white supremacy, he has only talked about a post-racial society.
Another point I find worth mentioning was that Marx saw that there needed to be an alternate system of values in order to free men from the market. The destruction of capitalism had to lead to an alternate social and economic system other than the one in place now which was only in place since the beginning of the 17th century (capitalism is a relatively new concept). Marx saw that human beings were alienated from each other through the system of capitalism.
Harvey explains it as a religious person saying, "I care about having good face to face relations with my fellow man, with being a good person and living life to the fullest and respecting others."
But when asked about what this fellow thinks of the market economy. "I couldn't give a hoot about that."
That in turn is the folly. How could a person care about human beings he sees face to face but not about his fellow humans who cloth, feed, and shelter him? This is because the capitalist market hides this. If we trully knew what went into our breakfast and cared about how it went into our breakfast then we would demand that those who put our breakfast on our tables be paid good wages since we would care enough about those who feed us. That is: the workers at the supermarket, the truck drivers, those who make the trucks, those who pump the oil from rigs, those who pluck the eggs, slaughter the pigs, raise the pigs, work the farms, pick the strawberries, etc., etc.
Photograph by:
David Bacon
Written out of the official story as quackery and the handiwork of a few nut-cases, Winfield demonstrates beyond doubt that eugenics was not only respectable, mainstream science but also that its major tenets were well-springs in the formation of American public schools with echoes in the every day practices of today. Formed in the crucible of white supremacy and rigid hierarchies of human value, American schools have never adequately faced that living heritage.
The Greater Echo Park Elysian Neighborhood Council is one of 88 neighborhood councils created in Los Angeles in the last nine years. Each is a junior varsity city council of sorts, with the ability to pass judgment on new development and other things, but its power lies largely in advising politicians who have real power.Then I read this just now in the New York Times and this just pissed me off:
...
Echo Park was one of the first L.A. suburbs and, later, was the site of some the city's first white flight.Now, the Anglos are coming back -- white return? -- and in recent years, that has begun to redefine life in the ethnic enclave that developed in their absence. Latino businesses and families have been pushed out, largely by rising rents.
It is Saturday evening, the second day of summer, and the air around Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem is filled with the scent of blossoming linden trees and the sound of West African drums.Oh for FUCK'S SAKE! I'm gonna blog in this soon. Just thought I'd share the articles.Across the street from the park is 2002 Fifth Avenue, a new seven-story cream and red brick luxury co-op with a doorman, $1 million apartments and a lobby with a fireplace.
The drummers in the park are African-American and from Africa and the Caribbean. They form a circle and have played in the park, in one form or another, since 1969...
...some in the building at 2002 Fifth Avenue, most of them young white professionals, have a different perspective: When the drummers occupy a spot nearby, residents say, they are unable to sleep, hear their television sets, speak on the telephone, or even have conversations...
Soetoro-Ng's appearances give voters a chance to get to know Obama as a person, not just an elected official. Her stories illustrate the development of his character, from his days as a teenager who loved basketball and bodysurfing and didn't always get the strongest grades, to his growing sense of civic duty in the summers she spent with him in Chicago.
But she also has a political role to play. She plans to spend her summer vacation - she is a teacher at an all-girls' school in Hawaii - introducing her brother to crowds such as this one.
"We are ready for a more complex construction of identity as a country," she said, dismissing the possibility some voters might find it hard to relate to Obama's multiethnic background and foreign experience.
Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.On the one hand, to hold on to their unfair position and advantages in society, to their white privilege, and feel right and good about it, whites had to believe racist lies. Like that blacks lacked brains or a willingness to work hard.
And yet, on the other hand, they knew that racism was wrong.
So in the 1970s whites reached a fork in the road: either give up racism and its advantages, in pride, position and wealth, or hang onto racism by becoming blind to it.
