Racism and White Supremacy

A lot has been going on with me in the past couple of days pertaining to group work and activist work at San Francisco State University and one issue that has been brought up in a few situations (completely unrelated to each other) is the issue of white privilege and white supremacy in society as supposed to just racism in general.

Essentially, racism is what most people expect it to be. It's thinking that one's own race is superior to others and that other races are either sub-human or not as gifted as one's own race. Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary racism is:

a. The theory that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race. b. = racialism.

racialism: Belief in the superiority of a particular race leading to prejudice and antagonism towards people of other races, esp. those in close proximity who may be felt as a threat to one's cultural and racial integrity or economic well-being.

racialist: a. n. A partisan of racialism; an advocate of a racial theory. b. adj. Of, pertaining to, or characterized by racialism.

This basically sums up what "racism" is. Yet there is racism and then there is white supremacy, which comes from white privilege, and comes from a society that has favored (and given rewards to) white people over people of color. Essentially, anyone can be a "racist." A Korean American father and mother could get upset at their son or daughter for a dating a Black person because they think Black people are "lazy" and "dumb" and a Black person could hate white people because they think that white people are inherently "inferior" and that the Black race is the superior race and the white race is the inferior devil race. Yet there is a marked difference between a Black person being racist and a white person being racist and enacting certain policies that affect many people of color around this country (and the world).

With the term racism, there is no power structure being implied in its use. With the term white supremacy there is a power structure being implied in its use. While a person of color can be racist it's not the same as a white person being racist and/or using his or her white privilege to gain an upper hand in society. A person of color may have racist thoughts but those thoughts are rarely enacted through the power structures of our society to effect mass change and to affect other people. The power structure in our society has been built up over time on white privilege and white supremacy and the people that have been exploited to make this country "great" were people of color. This structure is still in place and people of color are still in worse off situations than whites are (see "Living on the Other Side of the Color Line") and whites continue to benefit from a society that views white as the "norm" (white heroes in history books, whites in TV shows, whites in congress, whites as CEOs, etc.) and continue to benefit from past racist policies and from current racist and contemporary racist thought (see "Black Dolls/White Dolls," "Anti-Gang Injunctions," "Boxer Recalls Award," among other posts) as well as intentional or unintentional racist policies from the government that harm people of color but tend to not harm the white population. A person of color can be a racist, of course, but a person of color (due to the cited references above) cannot act on her or his racist views and in no way can harm whites at a mass level.

Someone who is a white supremacist (not in the classical KKK sense but in the more contemporary sense) in contrast can act on her or his racist impulses more often than not and still receives benefits from society despite being racist. Someone who is white and who holds the views that most welfare cases are "lazy Black mothers" (which actually isn't the case, from what I've been told) holds more sway (through lobbyists) than do people of color arguing that welfare shouldn't be changed since it will adversely effect people of color. This was the case under Clinton who changed the welfare laws during the 1990s. Also, white privilege holds sway over vast swaths of American life and affects people of all ethnic groups. Whites, most of the time, do not see their own privilege and enact policies, or lobby for policies, that would benefit them while in turn disenfranchising many people of color (all though they would do this under the guise of being "color blind" or that they believe all races should be "treated equally"). We see in the power structures of America that most of the people at the top (except for a few token exceptions) are white males, from the executive, to the judicial, to the congress, to the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, to many mid-level and high-level bureaucrats in major cities. These white people at top tend to hold many views that mainstream white Americans hold and in turn these views effect the way they govern and interact with other whites and other people of color. And this doesn't just include those in bureaucratic power put in everyday life as well and in everyday interactions that white people have and that people of color have. A white person would be hard pressed to remember the last time he or she had security follow them around a department store or having a cop asking them if they were lost because they were in such a "nice neighborhood" while a Black person could probably draw upon experiences from just the past month.

Another point on power structures and the difference between racism and white supremacy (which is not the same as Black or Brown power, etc.) is that racism also tends to imply that all races are "equal" and that all races can be "equally racist." Yet the reality of America is that not all races are equal. One could argue under a multicultural guise that whites need their own "European History Month," or day, etc. yet this ignores the fact that not all races are equal. The white race was essentially built up on privilege and didn't come from an ethnic group. There is no such thing as the white ethnicity (as suppose to the Han ethnicity or the Mein ethnicity or the Lgbo Nigerian ethnicity), "whiteness" was defined over the generations and was solely defined from privilege and exploitation. Not all racism is equal because not all racism affects people on a wide scale, but other types of racism do affect people on a wide scale. This is where the term white privilege and white supremacy come in. It's not enough to use the term racism, especially against people of color, since it is white supremacy that is prevalent in American society and it is white supremacy that effects the most changes in society and gives whites the most benefits and people of color the least benefits. Racism implies all types of racial bigotry are equal when in reality there is one type of racism that is above all else, that is white racism against people of color, white supremacy; and therefore using the term racism as a blanket statement for all racism in general, whether it be Black racism, white racism, Asian racism, etc. is not adequate enough and not accurate enough.

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"The Asians Have Landed! I Repeat, The Asians Have Landed!"

I came across a (what seems to me after viewing some of its contents for the past 15 minutes) great blog done by an Asian American called All Out for the Fight. In one of his blogs he comments on the New York Times article "Little Asia on the Hill" and how the image of the "Model Minority" is in fact:

fucking annoying and should be annoying to any Asian-American who strives to be fully human. Not only because it places impossible-to-reach expectations upon us, but because it is part and parcel of an attempt to keep us stranded from the struggles of black and Latino people and to strand black and Latino people from "polite" society in general.

We have gone over the fact in the previous post why it seems as though Asian Americans are successful at holding higher incomes but, when looked at closely, we see that this isn't the case that many whites make it out to be. In this blog the author goes over what he dislikes about the model minority myth in aspects to education, which is also something we will be going over in future blog posts.

The author goes on to make some good points on why there is a large influx of Asian Americans in college today:

What we can say is that post 1960s immigration policy was explicitly designed to have a strong correlation between legal immigration status and pre-immigration educational achievement. That means the Green Card lottery is skewed toward those families that already have a member of the family (often the patriarch) who has a Masters, and in an area where the U.S. is lacking in (i.e., those who have a Masters in Computer Science are distinguished even further in the process).

And:

Part and parcel of the model minority myth is the idea that affirmative action has harmed Asian-American enrollment. While it is true, if you make a monolith of Asians and Asian-Americans that you have a smaller percentage, when investigating further you find that those that are shafted by the dismantling of affirmative action in higher education are those that need higher education the most -- i.e., working class Asians. That is to say, while the pool of "Asians" in higher education at Berkeley and so on is greater now, examining further you'll find that the U.C. system as a whole has lost a great deal of its working class component with the end of affirmative action: big decreases in Hawaiian native, Pacific Islander (Samoan, Tongan, etc.) and Filipino populations. I would speculate that there are now a greater number of affluent East Asians -- "uptown Chinese" in the words of Prof. Peter Kwong -- who are winning a sort of "honorary white" status.

Commenting on the New York Times report:

In the end, the Times makes the quintessential flaw of the bourgeois liberal multiculturalist approach to race: defining the problem as a lack of "diversity" in the institution, rather than a lack of power in and over the institution for a given population.

On another point, scholar Yuko Kawai, in "Stereotyping Asian Americans: The Dialectic of the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril." Howard Journal of Communications 16, no 2 (April/June 2005): 109-130 states that:

The model minority stereotype has been criticized by Asian American scholars because of its political implications (e.g., Nakayama, 1988; Osajima, 2000; F. H. Wu, 2002) and also because it does not tell a story that resonates with the lived realities of Asian Americans (e.g., Suzuki, 1977; Takaki, 1989). It is, however, also the case that the model minority stereotype has been evaluated positively by Asian Americans. Cheng and Yang (2000), for instance, contended, ‘‘the model minority concept is not without its virtues; historically, it helped turn around the negative stereotypes of Asian Americans and the enhanced the positive image of Asian Americans’’ (p. 473). The model minority stereotype is argued by some to evoke negative implications such as racial hostilities and violence despite its seemingly ‘‘positive’’ image that it creates for Asian Americans. F. H. Wu (2002) posited that ‘‘the model minority myth hurts Asian Americans themselves. It is two-faced’’ (p. 67). The 1982 murder of Vincent Chin and the violence against Asian Americans in the 1992 Los Angeles riots are raised as such examples (e.g., Feng, 2002; Osajima, 2000; Palmer, 1999; Takaki, 1989; F. H. Wu, 2002). These negative consequences of the model minority stereotype can be better understood by thinking that ‘‘the concepts of the yellow peril and the model minority, although at apparent disjunction, form a seamless continuum’’ (Okihiro, 1994, p. 141) in the sense that Asian Americans as the model minority is ‘‘a complementary, benign image’’ of the yellow peril (p. 139).

And:

In the United States, the yellow peril signified the fear of Asian migration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Laffey, 2000). Asian immigrants’ different bodies and cultures were perceived as a great threat—the yellow peril—to American identity as the country of the White race and Western civilization (Lee, 1999). White Americans perceived people of Asian descent or ‘‘Orientals’’ as inassimilable foreigners who ‘‘would eventually overtake the nation and wreak
social and economic havoc’’ (Fong, 2002, p. 189).

This new model minority myth is yet another form of "Yellow Peril" with many whites lamenting the fact that there are too many Asian Americans overcrowding the best schools; yet at the same time, many whites use the model minority myth to attack other people of color by using the "fact" of the model minority to state that other people of color "need to get their act together" and that they are just "being lazy."

The first instance of the model minority myth was in 1966 when the New York Times and the U.S. News and World Report did articles on the "success" of many Asian immigrants. Kawai goes on to say:

By stressing that Asian Americans were succeeding through making efforts on their own despite their racial background, the model minority stereotype produces a ‘‘color blind talk,’’ the most influential racial ideology in the post-Civil Rights Movement era (Kim, 1999, 2000). Color blind ideology ‘‘furthers racial power not through the direct articulation of racial differences but rather by obscuring the operation of racial power, protecting it from challenge, and permitting ongoing racialization via racially coded methods’’ (Kim, 2000, p. 17). The word color blind was first used in 1896 in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in which U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harlan, opposing the ‘‘separate but equal’’ doctrine, stated that ‘‘our constitution is colorblind. . . . In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law’’ (quoted in F. H. Wu, 2002, p. 146). Harlan’s statement was meaningful at a time when people of color were officially segregated. Yet, in the post-1965 era, the idea of colorblindness has been appropriated by conservatives to rhetorically disguise ‘‘fundamentally racial claims’’ (Kim, 1999, p. 17). Critical race theorists argue that the ideology of colorblindness abstracts individuals from social and historical contexts and attributes the consequences of racial inequality to individual under-performance without acknowledging institutional racism (Guinier & Torres, 2002). Thus they challenge the concept of race as a formal and neutral category and, at the same time, advocate understanding the importance of race in U.S. society...Therefore, depicting Asian Americans as the model minority simultaneously serves downgrading other racial minorities as ‘‘problem’’ minorities (e.g., Kim, 1999, 2000; F. H. Wu,
2002).

The model minority myth also classifies Asian Americans as one monolithic group when the complete opposite is true. In an article done by Min Zhou and Yang Sao Xiong "The Multifaceted American Experiences of the Children of Asian Immigrants: Leassons for Segmented Assimilation." Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 6 (Nov. 2005): 1119-1152 the authors state:

Asian Americans are diverse not only in origins but also in some of the key demographic and socio-economic characteristics, underlying their differences in contexts of exit and reception. Unlike earlier immigrants from Asia, who were mostly male unskilled labourers with the intention of eventual returning to their homelands, today’s Asian Americans are a more settled group showing a fairly balanced gender ratio as Table 1 shows. The higher proportion of females among Filipinos, Japanese, and Koreans may have been due to war brides and the importation of nurses (Glenn 1988; Choy 2003). Asian Americans are more likely than non-Hispanic whites to live in married-couple and multigenerational families with larger average family size. They also have higher proportions of children under 18 and lower proportions of elderly over 64 with the exception of the Japanese.
Unlike their earlier counterparts, today’s immigrants from Asia also show a wide range of skill levels. Highly educated and skilled professionals tend to be overrepresented among Chinese, Indians, and Filipinos, while poorly educated, low-skilled workers tend to be over-represented among Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians, most of whom have entered the United States as refugees.
As a whole, Asian American average levels of education are exceptionally high. College graduates among those aged 24 /34 are more numerous than among non-Hispanic whites. Asian American median household income reached $61,000, much higher than among white families. But Asian American poverty rate is 13 per cent, which is higher than for whites. (Italics mine)

So while many Asian Americans are entering prestigious colleges it's mostly to do with their family's educational and class backgrounds since many Vietnamese and Cambodian Americans don't end up going to college (they mostly come from poorer backgrounds) as do Chinese Americans. So while, on the surface, the model minority myth may hold resonance, in reality the model minority myth is just another form of contemporary racist white thought and also misguided by not taking an in depth analysis into the real statistics.

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Living on the Other Side of the Color Line: The Gap Between Whites and People of Color

Carlo Montemayor and I were recently talking about our blog and Carlo told me that while we have much qualitative blogs about race we need more blogs with quantitative data. So with this I recently looked at the press release for the U.S. Census report entitled Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005 which was released in August 2006. Some statistics stuck out at me.

Black households had the lowest median income in 2005 ($30,858) among race groups while the median income in 2005 for whites was $50,784. Median income for Hispanic households was $35,967 while Asians had a median household income at $61,094.

There were 37 million people in poverty (12.6%) in 2005. Both the number and rate were statistically unchanged from 2004 and marked the end of four consecutive years of increases in the poverty rate (2001-2004). But the problem with this is that the poverty rates set by the Office of Management and Budget bureau is extremely low with the average poverty threshold for a family of four in 2005 was $19,971; for a family of three, $15,577; for a family of two, $12,755; and for unrelated individuals, $9,973. One person is not in poverty if they make $12,000?

The uninsured rate for whites was 11.3%, for Blacks it was at t 19.6%, for Asians it was at 17.9%, and for Latinos it was at 32.7%.

Statistically we can see that people of color are at a large disadvantage in many realms socially and economically. While Asian Americans have the largest income out of any race I have learned from Dr. Russel Jeung (in my Chinese American Personalities class from Spring 2006) that Asian American households have the greatest amount of income earners, and with that, they end up making close to that of Blacks and Latinos, well below whites. But, despite this, this still doesn't hit us with that much impact. When I was looking at other blogs on this subject I came across Krishworld Politics which had a good list of economic indicators on poverty and inequality between Blacks and whites in America which he got from a news report he had read. The report got its info from the NGO United for a Fair Economy which used the statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau. These tell an even more depressing situation than the raw statistics I quoted above.

In Krish's blog (taken from the United for a Fair Economy report State of the Dream 2004: Enduring Disparities in Black and White) it stated:

• Unemployment among Blacks is more than double that for whites, 10.8% versus 5.2% in 2003. A gap wider than in 1972
• Black infant mortality is also greater today than in 1970. In 2001, the Black infant mortality rate was 14 deaths per 1,000 live births, 146% higher than for whites. The rate was 37% less in 1970.
• Blacks had 55 cents to the white dollar in 1968. In 2001 the gap had only closed by 2 cents. At this rate it would take 581 years to achieve income parity.
• In 1968 median income for Black families was 60% of what white families made, now it is only 58% of what white families make.
• The average Black high school graduate working full time (from age 25 to 64) will earn $300,000 less on average over her or his lifetime than a white person at the same education level. An average Black college graduate will earn $500,000 less.
• The average Black family in 2001 had a net worth of just $19,000, including home equity, compared with $121,000 for whites. Blacks also have just 16% of the median wealth of whites, up from just 5% since 1989, At this rate Blacks would reach median wealth parity in 2099.
• Blacks have a nearly six year gap in average life expectancy compared to whites. It has only budged 1.81 years since the 1960s.

Not much has changed since last few years obviously. These following statistics (taken from the Census Bureau) were taking from the United for a Fair Economy report titled, State of the Dream 2005: Disowned in the Ownership Society.

• After slowly increasing from 55% of white income in 1988 to 65% in 2000, Black median income fell to 62% in 2003. And for the first time in 15 years, the average Latino household now has an income that is less than two-thirds that of the average white household.
• One of the reasons why it seems as though Asian American households have greater income is because immigration policies have led to a bipolar income distribution for Asian Americans. Asian American income data has an hourglass shape rather than a bell curve shape. Many Asian Americans coming to the U.S. come from upper class and professional backgrounds. Yet others come from backgrounds of poverty, such as refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia and many of those immigrants stay in poverty longer than others (thus not meeting the "Model Minority" myth).
• The report also states that per capita income is not higher for Asians than whites since Asian Americans tend to live in bigger families and have more employed people per family (as I had learned in my Chinese American Personalities class).
• Between the years 1992 and 2000 798,000 Black families rose out of the poverty level (yet, as we have seen, the poverty level is quite low) but between 2000 and 2003 300,000 Black families fell below the poverty line, showing how insecure many Black families are in their income levels.
• Blacks make up less than one-seventh of the U.S. workforce but they hold more than one-fifth of the below-poverty-wage jobs. By contrast, whites make up almost seven-tenths of the workforce but hold fewer than six-tenths of the low-wage jobs.
• Family poverty rates for Asians is at 10% while for whites it's close to 6%.
• In 2001 25% of whites owned stock while only 11% of people of color did. Stock ownership for upper-income whites has remained steady at 80% of families while for Blacks of upper-income families it fell from 75% in 1997 to 60% in 2004.
• 28% of white famlies recieve inheritances while only 7.7% of Black families do. The size of inheritance also varied widely with the parental median net worth of Black families at $47,000 compared to $198,700 for white families.
  

White Suspicion

I'm in Bellingham, WA which is 90 miles north of Seattle and about 20 miles south of the U.S. Canadian boarder. Bellingham is an interesting town, it's liberal like Marin County and the San Francisco Bay Area but it has some interesting dynamics. According to the Census Bureau its population is around 70,000 and is 87% white. There's a Native American reservation right next to Bellingham called the Lummi Indian Reservation. Belliingham is a nice town with cheap housing but its also filled with a lot of meth and crack houses and drug addictions, according to people living here. My friend Joe (whom I'm visiting, we traveled to Bellingham from San Francisco by car) was attacked by a bunch of meth addicts last year. While that might be bad, the reservation is horrible. It's like a third world country, alcohol rates are extremely high, my friend Joe works at the local YMCA and many Native Americans will come in stumbling drunk at twelve in the afternoon. The whole situation is very depressing, no jobs, racist policies, etc. cause for high rates in alcoholism. I was there myself and there was a lot of run down homes, trash, burnt out cars on peoples lawns, etc.

But the main gist, or observation, of this blog is this. I was at a party a few days ago and the party was mostly filled with white college students from local campuses (mainly Western Washington Unviversity). During the party a group of Black kids showed up, some of them with shirts that said "I Can't Feel My Face," which is a line Bobcat Goldthwait says in the movie Blow in reference to his cocaine use. I was latter told by someone I meet up there that he was suspicious of the Black kids because he saw one looking into a room. He (a white male) stated, "He was probably trying to stake out the place to steal something. I mean, that's what they were probably all trying to do." Of course, he ignored the fact that people where looking in rooms all night since there was about 50-75 or so people at this party.

Also, during the party this one white girl was yelling at one of her friends claiming that some "bitch" stole something from her and she was pointing to a Black girl in a crowd of three or four Black kids at the party.

Latter that night a few other white kids were talking and saying, "Man, those were some nigs up in there, shit."

Another person said, "Naw, they weren't nigs...Well, I duno."

"No," said the other, "they were nigs."

Essentially, the whole time people were being suspicious because these people were Black. Some of them may have been wearing weird shirts but then that night there was a lot of weird stuff going on. On white kid was wearing nothing but a beach towel and nobody said anything about it. Basically, because they were Black and because they dressed in a different style (i.e. "ghetto" as some would say) they had suspicion thrown on them from many of the white party goers at the party. Yet they hadn't done anything and they were all just as friendly as the other party goers.

The fact was that many of these white kids were putting suspicion on these Black kids but they wouldn't consider themselves racist (in the classic sense of the term, KKK, etc.) and might even have friends of color, yet when it comes down to it, they hold suspicions of many people of color who don't meet the "friendly" stereotype. While they may not be racist in the classic sense, there is racism (in the contemporary sense) being put into play which has effected these peoples view due to negative stereotypes in the media, at home, etc. A few days latter I asked if anything had been taken from the house, and just as I thought, nothing had.

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Anti-Islamic Rhetoric

This was a cartoon I found on Anti-CAIR and I think it sums up some pretty important issues that some Americans have with American Muslims


While this blog tends to tackle racism that's pretty much under the radar I think that this cartoon is pretty brazen. Essentially it seems to be saying that all Muslims in America are ultra-conservative Whabist Islamists and that the "moderate" Muslim you see walking down the street, or talking to in an office, may actually harbor "terroristic tendencies" and a "deep hatred" for America. I think this is a pretty dangerous view to hold (as well as a wrong one) since it seems to be putting any Muslim in a suit under suspicion of supporting terrorists (which seems to be the case these days).

I also think the other picture from the previous blog I just posted has some telling signs as well.


Basically its telling CAIR, and possibly many American Muslims, to just keep their mouths shut. Anytime a Muslim speaks they aren't going to be listened too, instead they will be condemned and profiled. Also the bleeding soldier seems to be showing that CAIR and Muslims are hurting America, yet the soldier is white, so essentially they are hurting white America and its "values," which to someone like the cartoonist who did this poster, are the "true American values."

This cartoon (while not as brazen as the first or second) seems to also show a popular misconception about American Muslims that many in this country have. First of all why does one need to ask a Muslim (especially an American Muslim) why some Muslims from (mostly) the Middle East decide to use terrorist tactics? Essentially this person is only being asked this because they are Arab and/or Muslim and because there is a misunderstanding about the Muslim American community and their views on terror. Many within the Muslim American community have spoken out (for more see "Selective Hearing of Muslim Voices Against Extremism and Terrorism" on The American Muslim web page) and most people who claim they haven't don't seem to be basing their opinion on much research, just because it's not on the news doesn't mean it doesn't exists. It also shows this person getting upset over something "little," which is a view that many people hold (especially whites), which is the view that they are just being "too sensitive." Yet are they really being "too sensitive" or are they reacting to a situation they deal with everyday? Just because one is Muslim does not mean they need to answer questions about terrorism everyday, especially terrorism mostly committed thousands of miles from their home. Also, this issue of "too sensitive" is always popping up in contemporary racist arguments and is something that will be discussed in further blogs.

ISLAMOPHOBES MISLEAD SENATOR BOXER

By Parvez Ahmed

This was an article I found on The American Muslim website and that originally appeared on Parvez Ahmed's blog site. I thought this would help shed more like on a previous blog on this very issue.

Parvez Ahmed is a board chairman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations and is an associate professor of finance at the University of North Florida.

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) recently rescinded an award to Basim Elkarra, the executive director of the Sacramento Valley chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

This disturbing news was met with a flurry of rhetorical high-fives by anti-Muslim extremists in the blogosphere. After Boxer's decision to rescind the award was made public, Elkarra received an e-mailed death threat. That threat is being investigated by the FBI.

But what led Sen. Boxer to rescind the award? The justifications offered range from the amazing to the bizarre.

According to Sen. Boxer's spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz, the senator became "concerned" after she read negative things about CAIR on a virulent anti-Muslim hate site. This despite the fact that the same website describes Sen. Boxer as someone who is "thickheaded" on national security and said, "The nation's dumbest Democrat, Barbara Boxer, has a plan to lose in Iraq."

It is truly disappointing to see Sen. Boxer use such a hate-filled and inflammatory site to form her opinions about CAIR, America's largest Muslim civil liberties group.

Just days before Sen. Boxer announced her decision, a demand for just such an action was issued by Joe Kaufman, an anti-Muslim extremist in Florida who has a long history of seeking to marginalize the Muslim community in that state.
Kaufman has in the past promoted terrorist organizations such as Kach and Kahane Chai on his website. In an article published on the forum of the radical Jewish Defense League in Florida, Kaufman praised the Kahane movement and its founder Mier Kahane by stating, "It was perfectly understandable, if he (Kahane) were to have hated Arabs."

Last year, Kaufman once again demonstrated his anti-Muslim bigotry by joining the call of Rev. O'Neal Dozier (who was subsequently removed from the campaign of Florida Governor Charlie Crist in part because of his bigoted views about Muslims) seeking to block the expansion of a mosque in Pompano Beach. "This mosque should not exist on American shores," said Kaufman." (St. Petersburg Times, 7/14/06)

The senator said she also relied on information from Steven Emerson, a "terrorism expert" with a history of defamatory attacks on CAIR almost since its founding in 1994. Emerson was the commentator who first blamed Muslims for the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma.

Sen. Boxer's decision to rescind the award contradicted her previous positive interactions with CAIR and was made without a single phone call or e-mail seeking a rebuttal to the Internet smears. In the past, CAIR received several letters of commendation from the senator. Members of her staff also attended CAIR events.

While American Muslims have grown used to such behavior from the extreme right, it was shocking to see a progressive politician like Sen. Boxer get caught up in our nation's rising tide of Islamophobia.

Sen. Boxer has now signaled a willingness to meet with CAIR officials both in California and in Washington, D.C. This is certainly welcome news.
CAIR has always taken a principled stand against terrorism and religious extremism.

From issuing a statement of condemnation immediately after the 9/11 attacks, to taking out a full-page ad in the Washington Post dissociating Islam from terrorism, to launching the "Not in the Name of Islam" online petition and public service announcement campaigns, CAIR's initiatives all point to an organization unequivocally opposed to terrorism in all its forms.

Representatives of the FBI are frequent participants at CAIR events nationwide and CAIR regularly conducts sensitivity training for federal and local law enforcement agencies.

In defending Boxer's position, Boxer's office has been using recycled news stories about the convictions of two people who had past associations with CAIR.
One of those people, a volunteer board member of a local CAIR chapter, undertook his actions after terminating his association with CAIR. The other person's activities came after he left his employment at CAIR. Whatever they did or did not do in their private capacities has nothing to do with CAIR. Holding CAIR responsible for the actions of former associates is guilt by association.

CAIR has tens of thousands of members, hundreds of volunteer board members and several dozen paid staff members nationwide. It would be unfair and un-American to hold any organization responsible for the actions of every individual, especially when such actions originate outside the scope of their employment or association.

Unfortunately, the general public's ignorance of their American Muslim neighbors is the oxygen that gives life to Islamophobia.

The reality is that American Muslims make up one of the most productive and law-abiding segments of our society. Recent polls show that nearly nine out of ten American Muslims vote regularly and nearly half volunteer for institutions serving the public (compared to a national average of 29 percent). The same poll indicated that American Muslims have high regard for CAIR.

By acting on smears, distortions and guilt by association, Sen. Boxer has failed her Muslim constituents and has betrayed the progressive values of her party and state.

Despite this disturbing episode, we remain committed to working with Sen. Boxer and with any other public officials who seek to build a better and more tolerant America.

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Civil War Clip Art

Malcolm X on Black Nationalism and White Privilege

This was an interview done in 1964 for the Monthly Review by A. B. Spellman that I came across while browsing through the website of the Monthly Review. In it Spellman writes:

The Muslims tell Negroes to be proud of their African heritage, to make a new identity for themselves by adopting an X or a Muslim surname and dropping their "slave name," thereby severing all ties with a history of subservience to whites. The Muslims have urged Negroes to be polite in their dealings with whites and to be non-violent, even if provoked. But if attacked, the Muslims say, a Negro should defend himself by any means at his disposal. The Muslim solution to the race problem in America is separation of the races, either in the allocation to Negroes of several states in the South or the repatriation of Negroes to Africa.WhileWhile

While I don't agree that the races should seperate, the concept of seperation, especially in the early 1960s, made sense to many Blacks who had been experiencing the most severe oppression one could imagine, especially since America was an apartheid state. He then goes on to write about Malcom's split with the Nation of Islam:

There had been rumors for some months to the effect that a split was developing in the upper ranks of Muslim leadership between a conservative and highly religiously-oriented faction led by Mr. Muhammad's family (which controls all the money) and a political activist faction led by Malcolm X. The split came early this March when Malcolm left the Nation of Islam to start an all-black political party. Malcolm is an overwhelming public speaker, particularly in Harlem where his positive demagogy is unchallengeable in the hearts and eyes of his audience, and in question and answer, or in debating situations where the stark realities of his uncompromising ghetto-eyed point of view can usually embarrass his antagonist, especially if that opponent is a black or white liberal. Malcolm is a product of the ghetto. He is the crystallization of whatever revolutionary impulse exists in the ghetto. He is an organizer and administrator of proven ability. For these reasons, he has the potential of becoming one of the really major revolutionists in America today.

With that Spellman goes on to touch on a number of issues.

On the concept of "reverse" racism Malcom states:

No, we're not racists at all. Our brotherhood is based on the fact that we are all black, brown, red, or yellow. We don't call this racism, any more than you could refer to the European Common Market which consists of Europeans, which means that it consists of white-skin people—is not referred to as a racist coalition—it's referred to as the European Common Market, an economic group—while our desire for unity among black, brown, red, and yellow is for brotherhood—has nothing to do with racism, has nothing to do with Hitler, has nothing to do with the Klan—in fact, the Klan in this country was designed to perpetuate an injustice upon Negroes; whereas the Muslims are designed to eliminate the injustice that has been perpetuated upon the so-called Negro.

On white privilege and the problem of whites joining organizaitons and taking active roles:

Whites can't join us. Everything that whites join that Negroes have they end up out-joining the Negroes. The whites control all Negro organizations that they can join—they end up in control of those organizations. If whites want to help us financially we will accept their financial help, but we will never let them join us.

SPELLMAN: Then black leadership is necessary?

MALCOLM X: Absolutely black leadership.

On the civil rights movement:

[The]civil rights movement, it remains within the confines of American domestic policy and no African independent nations can open up their mouths on American domestic affairs, whereas if they expanded the civil rights movement to a human rights movement then they would be eligible to take the case of the Negro to the United Nations the same as the case of the Angolans is in the UN and the case of the South Africans is in the UN. Once the civil rights movement is expanded to a human rights movement our African brothers and our Asian brothers and Latin American brothers can place it on the agenda at the General Assembly that is coming up this year and Uncle Sam has no more say-so in it then...
...
...local civil rights leaders are usually involved right in the midst of the situation. They see it as it is and they realize that it takes a combination of groups to attack the problem most effectively and, also, most local civil rights leaders have more independence of action and usually they are more in tune and in touch with the people. But the national leaders of the civil rights movement are out of touch with the problem and usually they are paid leaders. The local leaders usually have a job and they lean against the local situation on the side, but the nationally known leaders are paid. They are full-time leaders, they are professional leaders and whoever pays their salary has a great say-so in what they do and what they don't do, so naturally the ones who pay the salaries of these nationally known Negro leaders are the white liberals and white liberals are shocked and frightened whenever you mention anything about some X's.
...
I believe that it is a crime for anyone to teach a person who is being brutalized to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to defend himself. If this is what the Christian-Gandhian philosophy teaches then it is criminal—a criminal philosophy.

Also, Malcom touched upon how the working classes are split along racial lines and how while class is important in American society it is race that is the most pressing issue because:

The history of America is that working-class whites have been just as much against not only working-class Negroes, but all Negroes, period, because all Negroes are working class within the caste system. The richest Negro is treated like a working-class Negro. There never has been any good relationship between the working-class Negro and the working-class whites. I just don't go along with—there can be no worker solidarity until there's first some black solidarity. There can be no white/black solidarity until there's first some black solidarity. We have got to get our problems solved first and then if there's anything left to work on the white man's problems, good, but I think one of the mistakes Negroes make is this worker solidarity thing. There's no such thing—it didn't even work in Russia. Right now it was supposedly solved in Russia but as soon as they got their problems solved they fell out with China.

Image From:
Africana Studies Texas A&M University