THE HELP (2011) | The Unaffiliated Critic

THE HELP (2011) | The Unaffiliated Critic.

……The scatological focus culminates in what is simultaneously the “comic” highlight of the film, its cathartic climax, and its deus ex machina: Minnie, in revenge for being fired, feeds Hilly a chocolate cream-pie made out of Minnie’s own shit. This turns out to be the most important story in the book that Skeeter publishes, and a source of blackmail that removes any potential threat of retaliation from the evil White Queen. Because there were no problems in Jim Crow America that couldn’t be solved with a good fecal prank…..

GOPers Scramble to Change Alabama’s Immigration Law After White People Are Inconvenienced | AlterNet

Making Alabama racist immigration law safe for whites and Asians with money

GOPers Scramble to Change Alabama's Immigration Law After White People Are Inconvenienced | AlterNet.

The Rise of the Black Nerd – Page 1 – News – New York – Village Voice

The Rise of the Black Nerd – Page 1 – News – New York – Village Voice.

I am black nerd and proud.

John Mayer is a Dixie Whistling Neo-Racist (Redeux)

I posted this blog entry last April on my previous blog Black is Black is Black Ain’t. One of the commenter’s on this blog mentioned Mayer’s rant in Playboy and I went back to look at what I wrote this fool. I realize that in all this talk about the “normality” of the preferences of folks like Chad Ochocinco and Terrel Owens has a white male side of lust and revulsion around black women. What gets me looking back at this blog is Mayer’s staunch denial of the femininity and beauty of black women his “creeping to he slave shack” comments reflect the fact that he has plenty of sexual fantasies about black female actresses. His thinking reflects the pre-1960′s practice of paramour rights were white men could take sexual liberties with black women whether they were willing or not, single or married. Have some black men picked up on this thinking from their white male buddies? Are the uneven percentage of intermarriages not just a black male thing? How many non-black men sing the same song as John Meyer. Read my re-post and let me know what you think.
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John Mayer’s racial arrogance, narcissism and ignorance knows no bounds. Some of his recent comments could have been uttered by any Confederate flag waving, Christian Identify, Aryan Nations militiamen. Lets take a look at his behavior. In December, he racially heckled Kumail Nanjiani, an up and coming Pakistani comedian. Last month, Mayer gave playboy interview and praised Asians for their abilty to “talk white.” His sexist pig rants about his ex-girlfriends disgusting and no matter how annoying you find Perez Hilton you do not have the right use an anti-gay slur. He then switches to “I wish I was in Dixie” narcissism and states black people love him and that he knows what it is like to be “black.” Mayer’s racial narcissism is in full force when he agrees with the playboy interviewers “assumption” that black women are wantonly throwing themselves at him. He then prattles on he is a sexual white supremacist then he listed the few black women who he would stoop to have sex with if his willie did not have a racist mid of his own. He described how repellent black women are by invoking a member of KKK. He concludes by describing Holly Robinson-Pete, Karyn Parsons and Kerri Washington his “Benetton heart” finds attractive with the aplomb of a plantation owner at a slave auction. He seems to have no problem associating himself with men that raped and sexually assaulted black women from slavery up until the late 1960′s.

Mayer’s so-called “hood pass” which gives him access to the richest, most powerful black men in the world including the President of the United States. But apparently, his racial arrogance gives him the privilege to call this group of elite black men n**gers. I guess he also forgot that some of men have black wives? Yesterday he jumps on the apology train when he realizes that he has just alienated a large group of his fans….and folks like me who were foolish enough to buy his music should respond with Jesus like compassion?

It amazes me how quickly whites avow their racism. So far I have seen three of the typical comments to his comments: 1) He is just a rock star jack*ss or this just a product of his own individual persona2) Black people are racist (even more racist) than whites. 3) He is just a sexist. Please spear me, with the advent of computer mediated communication and video technology, this type of racial douchbaggery happens with startling regularity.

So Mayer doesn’t want revoke black peoples constitutional rights and I don’t doesn’t wax nostalgically about the days of lynching and rape (but his invocation of David Duke makes this debatable), but he has demonstrated a patten of contempt for people of color that has deep historical and contemporary connotations. But of course, some whites will insist Mayer is still not racist. Most whites cannot tolerate any investigation of the fact that their skin color still affords them social, economic, legal, educational and in the case of men sexual privilege. Many whites will not admit that their knowledge of most people of color is informed by stereotypes, rather than with any understanding of our history, culture or current challenges and are arrogant enough to feel that they are “expert” enough to state wholesale “truths” people of color. These facts of American life must be cast aside quickly because it challenges the core assumptions that have supported white privilege for centuries. What can whites do to challenge the racial status quo:

work to repeal racist drug sentencing laws

work to mandate that death row prisoners get DNA testing so that the criminal justice system will stop killing innocent blacks and Hispanics (and even a few poor whites).

Work to repeal racist school funding policies that give white schools more money and resources than black or Hispanic schools.

Work for sensible immigration policies that penalize employers for hiring undocumented workers instead of black, Hispanic or Native Americans.

Challenge your friends and family when they use racist slurs in your presence

Donate to or volunteer at HBCU’s and grassroots organizations that are working to improve black, Hispanic and Native American lives.

Real Housewives of D.C……Really???

I have to admit that I love the Real Housewives of Atlanta, it is over the top fun, so I looked forward to the Real Housewives of D.C. Silly me! Only one of the housewives is black. In D.C.??? Can I repeat D.C.??? In the Chocolate City with the first Chocolate President? There seem to be black party planners, black stylists and luxury goods sales men, on the fringes of the show, yet no other other sister was cast?

I can only surmise that most high powered black women are to busy with the real work of the Capitol to be on a T.V. show. Okay I figured that I would give it a try anyway. Unlike Kim, the wig wearing floosy from the Atlanta cast, these white women have clearly not used to being around black people. Mary interrupts a conversation between Stacie and the black celebrity hairstylist with a drunken rant on how hair salons need to integrate. Another doyen, Linda has a big , dark skinned black boyfriend that she frequently strokes like a dog. Kat, a British woman who has only lived in the area for a few months attacks Tyra Banks for being ghetto and praises George Bush over President Obama because the ex-prez was had time to come to her wedding and the current President was busy running the country! Kat, the Brit also was visibly uncomfortable in a black environment. When Stacie invites her new friends to a good old fashioned Southern Sunday dinner and Kit is so frazzled by the food, wine and Stacie’s extended family that she leaves before dessert.

After diner the husbands grab some man time during the dinner festivities, the men go downstairs and embarking on a bizarre conversation on penis measurement. Catherine’s husband is so uncomfortable that he starts making jokes about his Irish Catholic deficiencies. Linda’s boyfriend describes his Mandigo skills after the uncomfortable conversation. After watching two shows and a preview it seems that uncomfortable racial moments are going to be the benchmark of this variation of the series. Sadly like a bad car crash I will check in this debacle from time to time while I wait for the Peach State divas to come back on the air.

CNN in Black and White

This post is kind of a departure. If you are a news junky, some of these thoughts may have occurred to you recently.

I am a news junky and have been a fan of Anderson Cooper for years. It is now wonder that I wind down my day with a dose of the silver haired super-reporter. The top stories on Anderson Cooper360 were on race. I cannot remember a news broadcast like this since I was a child and the tension between blacks and whites were at their highest in the history of America. The first story was about the recently incarcerated serial killer that has been on the prowl since March. Since I have set up my news feeds to black news everyday I have been following this since before the mass killing in New England. I wondered as the body count continued, when this would hit the national new and waited for months. Elias Abuelazam was arrested, let go once and on his way out of the country after attacking 17 black men, one Hispanic man and two whites, killing five black men. After all of this there are still talking heads saying this is not racially motivated. It seems that their is a massive amnesia in this country around the history of racial violence terrorism in this country. There is case being adjudicating in South Carolina where a white man killed a black man, that in itself is no big whoop. But he then tied a noose around his neck and dragged him until hewas dismembered. As most people who have been conscious since the 1990′s know that is post-modern way to lynch black person. Based on the very recent history of this country (wasn’t the Jena protests less than two years ago?) why do I wonder how many black men you have to murder these days to be called a racist?

The second story was the outcome of a recreation of the Kenneth and Mamie Doll test that was one of the primary pieces of evidence in Thurgood Marshall’s defense in Brown v. Board of Education. The test has been reliably repeatedly over the decades and correlates good characteristics with white skin and bad ones with darker skin. The test subjects were black children between six and ten. The test is still valid. Young black and mixed raced children still think that it is better to be white than black. It was painful to see these beautiful children express the belief that they were ugly, dumb and undesirable just like their peers sixty years ago.

The last story made my jaw drop. Conservative talk show host Laura Schlesinger let loose a rant that made Tea Party “satirist” Mike Williams look like Martin Luther King. I was aware that she was a hard right social conservative but I was unaware that her racial animus rivaled Beck and Limbaugh. She basically said that a black woman who tired of her white husband’s family racist comments. She proceeded to call her hypersensitive, whine about how can white people can’t say the n-word, that blacks should stop whining now that there is a black President, that blacks are demonizing whites as racist because of black activism, to top it off she said that the woman that she had no sense of humor, should not married outside her race, and cavalierly dropped the n-word at least 15 times. Today she halfheartedly apologized, but if you have ever been on a blog or news site about race in the Obama Age the same ideas come up in different combination during every electronic “conversation about race.” As a first generation civil rights baby and scholar in this area, I think much more about this the average person, but am hoping that these stories along with calls for changes to 1st and 14th Amendments to the Constitution are not the harbinger of some moral panic stirred by fear of future? I think I will go watch the brain numbing goodness of AdultSwim now.

ABWW News: The Invisible Woman of Color

November 22, 2009
The Invisible Woman of Color
By Tom Jacobs
www.miller-mccune.com

New research finds black women are more likely to go unnoticed and unappreciated than black men or whites of either gender. The study suggests that on an unconscious level, black women are treated as “interchangeable and indistinguishable” from one another. ( Editorial Note: So either black women are overly recognized as stereotypes or we invisible. Ain’t that about a B*tch!)

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is a classic novel about a black man who feels unseen by his white neighbors. But new research suggests the most invisible Americans of all may be African-American women.

A just-published study suggests black women experience “a qualitatively different form of racism” that contributes to them not being “recognized or correctly credited for their contributions.” On an unconscious level, African-American females are “treated as interchangeable and indistinguishable from one another,” according to University of Kansas psychologists Amanda Sesko and Monica Biernat.

In the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Sesko and Biernat describe two experiments — one testing facial recognition, another examining spoken statements. In the first, 131 white undergraduates looked at 32 headshots. After completing a short filler task, they were shown those same 32 photos along with 24 new head shots — six each of white men, white women, black men and black women. They were asked to indicate whether each photo was new, or a repeat from the first group.

The results: “White participants were least likely to correctly recognize black women in comparison to the other groups. They were relatively unable to distinguish a black woman they had seen before from a ‘new’ black woman.”

In the second study, participants listened to a recorded conversation among eight college students, and were shown photos of the discussion participants as they spoke. Afterwards, they were asked to match specific statements with photos of the people who spoke them.

“Black and white women were more likely to be confused with each other than black and white men,” the researchers report. “Participants were more likely to incorrectly attribute statements made by black women to other targets than they were to misattribute white women’s, black men’s or white men’s statements.”

“These effects cannot be attributed to particular features of the targets, as careful pre-testing was conducted to ensure equal age, attractiveness, facial expression and distinctiveness (among the head shots),” the researchers conclude. “Instead, these studies provide evidence of black women’s relative invisibility, at least among college-age white samples on a predominantly white campus.”

ABWW Heroine of the Day: Shirley Sherrod

When I first saw the edited tape I was suckered like the NAACP, the Agriculture Department and the White House. When the story began to trickle out I watched it again and you can clearly see that the audio does not match the movement of her lips. Andrew Breitbart is an anti black conservative who planned to besmirch this woman and in order to promote his agenda that blacks are more racist than whites have ever been. There are still people in America that believe that blacks are lazy, childishly dependent on the government and so intellectually deficient that the Democratic party leads us around by the welfare dollar. People like this have used the idea that black women are immoral and lazy for decades. Reagan’s emphasis of the “black welfare mother” is still used by conservative political activists, even though whites have always been a larger proportion of the welfare roles in America than African Americans.

The War on Drugs was hyped by reports of black female hypersexual crack addicts while havoc that users of powdered cocaine produced was disregarded. Images of lazy, immoral black women pumping out a generation of crack debilitated babies on the government tit, helped push through the racist drug laws that have incarcerated three generations of black and Hispanic non-violent drug offenders. It is time that these anti-black conservatives like Andrew Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh are called out and denounced. Bill O’Riley and FOXNEWS needs to start calling themselves FOXENTERTAINMENT or learn journalistic ethics. I applaud Ms. Sherrod for her courage and steadfast efforts to help poor people no matter what their race over a 45 year period. When racial conservatives state “we need to forget about slavery”, they erase the 100 years in between slavery and the passage of civil rights legislation. Ms. Sherrod is a survivor of the long campaign of domestic terrorism that that is so often dismissed by racial conservatives. Despite the fact that her father was murdered by a white man who was never prosecuted and the KKK threatened her family, Ms Sherrod remained in the South during an era when the danger of racial terrorism was an everyday concern. She soon learned that poor vs. rich can trump black vs. white, rose above her pain and loss and devoted her life to helping those without the resources to help themselves. Watch the entire speech an see how amazing this woman’s journey really was.

2 officers out of jobs in wake of repeated Tasering of woman

Not only are black women unprotected by law enforcement and criminal justice, but they are assaulted rather than assisted by those sworn to “protect and serve.” This is how police treat a black female victim of domestic violence.

By Rhonda Cook – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Janice Wells called the Richland Police Department when she feared a prowler was outside her clapboard house in the rural west Georgia town. The third-grade teacher had phoned for help. But within minutes of an officer coming to her backdoor, she was screaming in pain and begging not to be shocked again with a Taser. With each scream and cry, the officer threatened her with more shocks.

“All of it’s just unreal to me. I was scared to death,” Wells said in an interview with the AJC. “He kept tasing me and tasing me. My fingernails are still burned. My leg, back and my butt had a long scar on it for days.” The officer in question is Ryan Smith of the Lumpkin Police Department. Smith was called to back up an officer from the Richland Police Department because the sheriff’s office in the county, Stewart, had no deputies to send. Smith resigned as a result of the incident. The other officer involved, Tim Murphy of Richland PD, was fired for using pepper spray while trying to arrest Wells.

Wells is considering filing a lawsuit, according to her attorney. The details of the altercation between Wells and the officers have been fodder discussions in the two towns, which are only 10 miles apart. Some have speculated there was a racial component to the altercation between Wells and the policemen; Wells is black and the officers are white.
Stewart County Sheriff Larry Jones, who came to the house seconds after the last electric shock was administered, suspects the outcome would have been different if the woman had been white and the officers black. “I don’t think they would have done a white female like that,” said Jones, who is black. “If they had, it wouldn’t have been any doubt about whether they need to be terminated.”

Much of what happened in front of Wells’ house was recorded by the camera on the dash of Smith’s patrol car. The AJC obtained a copy of the video. Wells, hidden from camera view by the open door of the Richland patrol car, can be heard pleading, “Don’t do that! Don’t do that!” “Get in the car. Get in the car. You’re going to get it again,” Smith answered. Almost immediately there is another clicking as the Taser is discharged again and Wells screams.
“Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” Wells pleads again.

Smith, who quit eight days after the incident, remains unrepentant. “I did what I had to do to take control of the situation,” Smith told the AJC about his decision to repeatedly discharge his Taser. Yet his former boss, Lumpkin Police Chief Steven Ogle, was shocked when he saw the video. “I couldn’t believe it,” Ogle said. “You don’t use it [a Taser] for punitive reasons, to prod someone. It was evident it was an improper use of force. He was an excellent officer other than that incident.” Smith resigned just as Ogle started the process to fire him, the chief said. Smith now works for the Chattahoochee County Sheriff’s office.

And on April 28, the Richland Police Department fired Murphy, the officer who first arrived at Wells’ home. Murphy declined to comment saying he had been told there was an open investigation. Some of the details contained in police department records conflict with those provided in interviews. And only the end of the encounter between Wells and the officers is captured on video. But all agree that the struggle between Wells, 57, and Murphy, 52, started because she would not tell him the name of a friend who was at her house in Richland, 35 miles southeast of Columbus, when Murphy arrived around 9:30 p.m. on April 26. Wells, who teaches in Columbus, said she had called to report a prowler. Murphy wrote in his police report that he was dispatched to check out a report of an “unwanted guest.”

John Robinson was at Wells’ house when Murphy pulled up. Robinson told the AJC his friend of 26 years had called him to be with her until the police arrived. Robinson lives 10 miles from Wells and her husband was in McRae, almost 90 miles away. According to Robinson, Wells and the police reports, the officer only asked Robinson how long he had known Wells, the status of their relationship and where he lived. Murphy asked nothing more, not even Robinson’s name.Moments later Robinson left. Murphy wrote he let the man leave because it is best to separate people in domestic violence situations.“I could always arrest him later if I needed to since he lived nearby,” Murphy wrote in a report obtained by the AJC.

But Wells and Robinson said there was no violence and nothing to suggest there had been any. As Robinson pulled out of the driveway, Murphy asked Wells for her friend’s name. She refused to give it. “’You don’t need to know that,’” Murphy wrote in his report was Wells’ response. “I told her that she would need to give me the information that I needed or she would be arrested for obstruction. I explained that state law mandates that we investigate to determine if there has been any family violence.” She retrieved her purse and began walking around the side of her house until Murphy said he was taking her to jail.

“Janice then backed up from me in a fight or flight stance and I grabbed her arm and placed a handcuff on it,” Murphy wrote. “She pulled away and she took off. I sprayed her with pepper spray. I chased her around the house and tripped and fell, injuring my knee just as I caught up with her. As I was once again walking her to the car, she broke loose again and ran. She tripped and fell and I grabbed her again. As we got to the car, I attempted to get the other handcuff on her and get her in the car.”

Wells told the AJC, she finally stopped. “I fell to the ground. I was balled up and I was begging him to leave me alone,” Wells said. “Then he called for help.” Smith answered Murphy’s call for backup. In his report, Smith wrote he was concerned for Murphy’s welfare because his voice was weak. “[He] sound[ed] as if he could barely talk,” Smith wrote.The camera recorded images of Smith’s short drive down a two-lane road, but once he got within sight of the Wells’ clapboard house, the dash cam also began recording sound. As Smith pulled up, the video showed, Murphy was leaning on the roof of his car and a side door was open. He appeared to be talking to Wells, who was “in a ball position facing the ground,” according to Smith’s report.

Smith, 22, said nothing as he strode to the side of the car, his Taser in hand.Then came the sound of the electric buzz of the Taser and Wells screaming “Oh God! Oh God!”“Get in the car! Get in the car! Get in the car! You gonna get it again,” Smith screamed. Wells cried. In seconds the sound of the Taser can be heard again.“Don’t do it. Don’t do it. I ain’t gonna do nothing,” Wells pleaded. Smith is heard threatening a more aggressive setting on his Taser.
And then he used it again.

“It felt like electricity going through your body,” Wells said. “He was tasing me so fast and I was asking them to stop. To me, it was like it was a dream.” Murphy’s report says Smith used his Taser three times.Smith said he probably discharged the Taser three or four times for a total of six seconds. One of those times, he shocked himself.
The sound from the video suggests he discharged the device at least four times. Wells’ attorney, Gary Parker, said it may have been as many as 12 times. Parker said no decision has been made on filing a lawsuit but he is talking with local officials about a resolution.

After hearing about the calls to Wells’ house, a woman he had known for years, the sheriff got to the house just as she was shocked for the last time. He said he could hear her screams as he pulled up.“Larry, help me,” Wells said as the sheriff walked up. “Larry, I didn’t do nothing.” Jones said, “It took my best to hold my composure.”
On the video, Jones can be heard softly reassuring Wells. Later that night, Jones bonded Wells out of jail and drove her to an area hospital to be examined.He watched the video from the dash camera later.“It was worse than what I thought it was. I was shocked,” the sheriff told the AJC.”The public needs to know.”

ABWW History Lesson of the Day: Ruby McCollum and Paramour Rights

Contrary to what many non-blacks think black people do not spend a lot of time talking about our history in this country. My opinion is that it is simply too painful and many do not know enough about our history to know that along with the terrorism, the are stories of resilience and triumph. This sadly is not one of them. Paramour rights is a term coined by the great writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Huston. During her studies of turpentine camps in the 1930′s she found that white men would pick black women out for sexually coercive relationships whether they were married or not. This practice which many like to think ended with slavery was alive and well in the 1950′s when of Ruby McCollum, a middle class, married black woman who murdered her white lover and father of two children, Dr. C. Leroy Adams, in Live Oak, Florida, in 1952. When McCollum testified during her 1954 trial she stated that her doctor had forced her to bear his child, and then threatened to kill her if she refused to bear him a second child. The all-white jury convicted her of murder and McCollum was sentenced to die in the electric chair while still pregnant with Adams’ child. She appealed, and three months ago the State Supreme Court ordered a new trial on the ground that the jury had inspected the murder scene without the judge and Ruby McCollum being present. But Ruby was pronounced insane and, instead of being retried, was sent to Florida State Mental Hospital at Chattahoochee and was not released until 1980. McCollum was unable to recall most of the events the led up to her institutionalization since her “illness” was treated with Electroconvulsive therapy and anti-psychotic medication.

The era between the Civil War and the modern civil rights is marked with the untold abuse of black women, that I contend contributes to the intensification of black woman hateration over he last 40 years. In this period black women fought to live up to the standards of mainstream white femininity, but how could they do that when white men could debase them at anytime without any fear of legal consequences? Most black women did not have the luxury to be full time homemakers like the standards of femininity required, they were in the homes of white men that still saw his access to a black woman’s body was a God given right? Black men were not economically capable of giving their women the protection of a stay at home wife and risked his life and his family if her attempted to defend his woman’s honor. This phenomenon was on the wane but still in practice during the civil rights movement yet we never discuss it and the impact that decades this abuse may had on black families? Did the pain, anger, frustration of black men who were unable to protect their wives contribute to the contempt many black men have for us today

There are several books and a play about this case available at Amazon Check it out if you want to know more about this vital yet forgotten piece of American history.