At the time of the shooting, Grant was unarmed, on the ground, his hands were hand-cuffed behind him.  Grant was employed as a butcher at Farmer Joe’s Marketplace in Oakland, had a young daughter, Tatiana, age 4.   Several people at the BART train station recorded the incident on their mobile phones, and witnesses reported that Grant begged officers not to shoot him, telling them he had a young daughter.

The BART cop who shot him, Johannes Mehserle, has since resigned his position, thus avoiding internal affairs investigators. And, lawyers have filed a $25 million lawsuit against the transit authority on behalf of Grant’s family.

As Grant was laid to rest today, protestors gathered at the Fruitvale BART station where he was killed to demand justice (update: the protest prompts The New York Times to take notice).

While officials at BART are suggesting that the shooting was an “accident” in which Mehserle mistook his gun for his taser, the videos taken at the scene suggest otherwise.  The BART cops move Grant from a seated (and hand-cuffed) position, place him on the ground face down, and then Mehserle reaches for his gun and shoots Grant in the back. It is not hyperbole to call this an execution. Clearly, this is an example of excessive force, and it is a nothing less than a racist murder.  And, racists are lining up to defend Mehserle’s actions.  For example, Michael Crook joined the Facebook group “Justice for Oscar Grant,” then started a discussion thread called “Quit Whining,” in which he writes:

“This was a justified shooting, and even if the officer was in error, another ape is off the streets. … This is just another family of black monkeys wanting a payday.”

I suppose the good news is that the other members of that Facebook group called out Crook for his racism.   At this point, no one knows  whether or not Mehserle held these kinds of overtly racist views.  And, to some extent it’s beside the point.    Whatever Mehserle’s individual level of racism, Grant is still dead because of racism.  The racist idea expressed by Crook that some lives are less valuable than others is one that pervades our institutions, particularly criminal justice institutions, and operates without individual racists. Institutional racism assures that some people, particuarly young black men, are continually viewed as suspects and are perpetually vulnerable to assault by police.

As I mentioned, there are multiple videos of this shooting taken by concerned passers-by.  This may persuade some that there is incontrovertible evidence of this outrageous, criminal act.  But, the institutionalized racism that creates black men as ontological suspects has already started denying the reality of this mobile phone video evidence.   In one report, there’s mention that Grant possibly had a criminal record; in another, a BART spokesman calls the video evidence is “inconclusive”; and, reports are painting Mehserle as sympathetic for a variety of reasons, including the fact that he is getting death threats.    For observers of racial politics in the U.S., this should all sound eerily similar to the kinds of strategies used in the trial of the LAPD cops accused of beating Rodney King.   As you may recall, even though there was clear, stomach-turning video of those officers brutally beating and tasering the unarmed King, defense lawyers for the cops successfully portrayed King as a “monster” and a “thug” and cast the officers as “victims” who felt threatened by him.   All the officers were acquitted of beating King, and if past is prologue, I expect Mehserle to walk without criminal prosecution.

The sort of citizen journalism and activism of cop-watch style actions are promising for addressing brutal acts such as the racist murder of Oscar Grant. Yet, the lessons of racism in the recent past are that these are important, but not sufficient in and of themselves to bring about justice.  For that, we must work much harder.  Take action.

Part of what was intriguing to me about the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article is that the reporter, Ty Tagami, takes up the comparison of the cloaked site and the legitimate King Center site, a comparison that I address in my research.   What I found in comparing traffic to both websites using the web traffic site Alexa is that at this time of year, around Martin Luther King Day, there’s a big increase in the number of visitors to both sites.  Here, in a graph generated by me via Alexa, traffic to the legitimate site appears in blue, the traffic to the cloaked site appears in red.  The time period covered is the first six months of 2006; and, the website traffic is graphed here in terms of “Daily Reach (per million)” along the left, and the months across the bottom.

There are several things worth noting in this graph.  First, and perhaps most alarming, the traffic to both websites peaks in mid-to-late January, around the time of the national Martin Luther King holiday.  I interpret this to mean that people are interested in learning more about Dr. King around the time of the annual holiday, and log on to find more information.  Relying on a typical search engine, they find both sites and inadvertently end up at the cloaked site.   Second, what’s telling about this year in particular is that 2006 is the year that Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s widow, passed away (January 30, 2006) and the traffic for the King Center reflects a rather dramatic jump around that time.   This is the only time that the traffic for both sites is noticeably different.  Mostly, the two sites have very similar patterns.

This suggests a rather profound shift in the terrain of racial politics.  Using a standard search engine and the search terms “Martin Luther King” this website regularly appears third or fourth in the results returned by Google.  Before even viewing the content of this site, the URL makes it appear to be legitimate, in part because the main web reference is made up of only the domain name “martinlutherking,” and the URL ends with the suffix “.org.” The decision to register the domain name “martinlutherking.org” relatively early in the evolution of the web, was a shrewd and opportune move for advocates of white supremacy; failure to do likewise was a lost opportunity for advocates of civil rights. Recognizing that domain name registration is now a political battleground, a number of civil rights organizations have begun to reserve domain names to prevent them from being used by opponents of racial justice.  For example, the NAACP has registered six domain names that include the word “nigger” and the ADL has registered a similar number of domain names with the word “kike.”    However, registering offensive epithets is only a small part of the struggle.  The move by opponents to equality to register the esteemed symbols of civil rights as domain names, such as Martin Luther King, and use them to undermine racial justice is one that was clearly unanticipated by civil rights organizations.

To be effective, cloaked sites with seemingly legitimate-sounding domain  rely on the naïveté of their target audience.   This naïveté is about both new media literacy and about a racial consciousness that recognizes and resists the white racial frame.   Cultivating both of these is important as we once again approach the national King Holiday and millions of web visitors look for information about Dr. King.

The “magic Negro” term has been used for some time as a sarcastic term for a common plot device used by (mostly white) writers and producers in stories and movies where a black person appears to help out a white protagonist. Wikipedia summarizes some literature on the idea this way:

The magical Negro serves as a plot device to help the protagonist get out of trouble, typically through helping the white character recognize his own faults and overcome them. Although he has magical powers, his “magic is ostensibly directed toward helping and enlightening a white male character.” It is this feature of the magical negro that some people find most troubling. Although from a certain perspective the character may seem to be showing blacks in a positive light, he is still ultimately subordinate to whites. He is also regarded as an exception, allowing white America to “like individual black people but not black culture.” [like Sidney Poitier portrays in The Defiant Ones, the prototypical magical Negro movie]

In their fine book on the movies, Hernan Vera and Andrew Gordon describe the use of black characters in many movies as “saviors” or “sidekicks” of the main white protagonist; their book is probably the best scholarly study on this device. They point out how rarely the black actor (and other actors of color) historically has been the central protagonist, but get this sidekick or savior role.

In his 2007 article Ehrenstein contended that Obama was just such a magic Negro because of the way many whites were stereotyping and reacting to him–because of

his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden ham-fistedly reminded us, is “articulate.” His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn’t called his opponents names (despite being baited by the media). Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn’t project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.

That is, in better terminology, Senator Obama was, and still is, construed by many whites from a colorblind version of the old white racial frame, one that views him as a safe exception to his race because he almost never has spoken of racial matters, the unfinished civil rights agenda, or enforcing civil rights laws. He speaks of unity, not of racism.

Ehrenstein’s article had a serious analytical purpose. But the language somehow inspired Paul Shanklin, the conservative speaker and satirist, to write a satirical song, “Barack the Magic Negro,” (to the tune of “Puff, the Magic Dragon”), that was then played first by Rush Limbaugh on his talk show and became popular in conservative circles as a way of mocking Obama. Now the “magic Negro” term became an attack phrase, to mock Obama, and by implication, black men like him generally.

The political plot thickened when in December 2008, Chip Saltsman, a white Republican political operative and candidate for chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), circulated a Christmas Greeting CD to Republican National Committee members. The song’s mocking lyrics offer a negative parody of leaders like Al Sharpton critiquing Obama as a black latecomer who came in “late and won.” Some Republican conservatives defended this racialized mocking of Obama and other black leaders as inconsequential, while other Republicans, including the 2008 RNC chair, said they were appalled at Saltsman’s actions and noted that actions like this indicated the Republican Party needed more diversity. (This latter point is on target, indeed, for just 1.5 percent of the nearly 2400 Republican Party delegates at the summer 2008 convention were black.)

Certainly, this phrase “magic Negro” is now regularly used in this country, especially aggressively by conservatives and white supremacists–some hundreds of thousands of times already on the Internet.

In addition, on New Year’s day 2009, Fox News “accidentally” aired a text message from a viewer that said that “let’s hope the magic negro does a good job.” Fox apologized.

The Saltsman debacle has created much debate in and outside the mass media and the Internet. What do you think of all this?

Part of the reason Joe and I started this blog was to provide resources for those who typically stand in front of the classroom, as well as provide an ongoing place for discussion for all of us who sit in those rows and rows of chairs ( photo credit: brandongreer - with apologies to all you Freirians who are putting your chairs in a circle, the ones at my institution are bolted to the floor like the ones in this image).   We’ve added a pages here with a few syllabi from other instructors (feel free to send me others and I’ll add them to the collection).   We’ve also got a good list of topic-relevant documentaries from a variety of filmmakers that you may find useful in designing your courses.   Or, if you’re taking a course, these will point you in the direction of books and films that could help you learn more.   In addition to these rather unidirectional resources, the interactive quality of the blog can be useful for learning about race and racism.

I’ve made use of this blog in my classes, and it can work quite well.   Here are some suggestions for ways to use Racism Review in the classroom:

1. Assign it as supplemental reading requirement. This is good choice if you have a few students who are very interested in the topic and want explorations beyond the classroom.  As with any supplmental reading, this is difficult (if not impossible) to evaluate, so I don’t usually include this in the grading scheme.
2. Make it a required reading assignment. As a required reading assignment, you can then have students write a reaction paper to what they read in a post (either whatever’s currently on top of the blog, or you as the instructor can pre-select one and assign it). You can also have students read the blog and come to class prepared to discuss what they’ve read (my experience is that the discussion is more lively if they’ve written about it first, but your mileage may vary, as they say).  Again, the reading is difficult to evaluate on its own, so the grading scheme here would be to evaluate the reaction papers or the classroom discussion.
3. Offer students the option of extra credit points for comments. This is what I’ve done most often, and it seems to work well with undergraduates who are highly motivated by extra credit points.   Typically, what I offer is one point of extra credit (added to the cumulate course average) with a maximum of five to ten points, depending on the class.   I require the students to print out all the comments they made and hand them in on the last day of class.
4. Volunteer to Guest-Blog about a topic that you’re covering in the class and have students comment. It’s often the case that we have so much more that we want to share with our students than the boundedness of the physical classroom will allow, and the blog is a good way to push beyond those walls.  I found this especially useful when I was teaching a class about Hurricane Katrina and there was just so much more I wanted to share with the class than I could in the allotted time.   So I addressed those issues in the form of blog posts, and then assigned them as required reading.  If you’re teaching about race/ethnicity and find that there’s a particular topic you’d like to explore in more depth, consider being a Guest-Blogger for Racism Review and writing a post on the topic.   (Email me for details if you’re interested: jessiedanielsnyc _at_ gmail _dot_ com).
5. Create writing assignments for students that follow a blog post format. This is a more advanced sort of assignment and I’ve done this with upper-division undergraduates and graduate students.  Depending on what your other pedagogical goals are in the course, you might want to think about including writing assignments that require students to write in the form of a blog post.   If they’re good, and they’re about racism, we’d be happy to include them here as guest-bloggers.   The format we usually follow is fairly simple:  500-1,500 words on a current news item related to race/racism with some analysis that includes relevant social science research.  The tone is professional, but relaxed.   In one graduate course I taught, the blog writing was 30% of the overall grade and I evaluated it based on both form and content.   This can be an excellent assignment for more highly skilled students, and especially students who are familiar with blogs and used to the format.   The possibility of getting their post on a well-read blog can be a real incentive for hard work in the classroom.
6. Something fabulous you design. Of course, I’m sure there are lots of other ways you could have (or already have) used this blog in your classes.  Let us know what you’re doing and how you’ve used the blog in the classroom.

Happy pedagogy!

During the 1800s, the American Colonization Society enticed free Negroes to go to Africa. Slaves were freed on the condition they leave. These two groups that became the “Americo-Liberians” who ruled Liberia, carried with them the evils of racism and the limitations of slavery.

Racism inevitably reproduces itself in the minds of the oppressed in order to rise. In the “Imitation of Supremacy,” as victim becomes victimizer, the Americo-Liberians saw the natives the way whites saw them. Now that the Americo-Liberians were rulers, they mimicked white rule. They justified their exploitation of the natives on the basis of cultural inferiority just as whites used racism to justify slavery. In America, race trumped all other considerations. In Liberia, culture trumped race as the classification of inferiority.

In the “Imitation of Superiority,” [some? many?] Americo-Liberians mimicked and retained the culture of the antebellum South because they derived their cultural superiority from it. The vast majority of the Americo-Liberians were freed slaves, including slaves freed on the high seas. Because of the limitations of slavery, they were image rather than reality. What they evolved was a pseudo culture, a poor replication of what they didn’t really understand. As slaves they had had only a “taste” of Western culture.

Ironically, they replicated what they despised – oppression and discrimination based upon “inferiority.” Natives were disparaged and ridiculed as “country people.” The Americo-Liberians set up all the Jim Crow laws of the South in Liberia. There was social segregation in Monrovia, the capital city. Among other things, natives could not enter through the front door. They could not vote. They could not speak unless spoken to. There were sexual restrictions. No native man could marry or have a sexual relationship with an Americo-Liberian woman. Even when natives became educated, they were restricted from government positions. Only a token few were allowed to participate.

This research and eyewitness account of how U.S. racism affected, and infected, the minds of people of African descent is striking. Even as the racially oppressed, some number of them carried the structures and orientations of aspects of white racial oppression back to Africa. The idea of the white racial frame that we have used on this site, and I have developed in several books, clearly needs to be developed even more aggressively with regard to the international context and impact.

According to Dennis, these (it is unclear whether he means some or many?) Americo-Liberians carried this white racial framing–with its negative view of Africa and other non-Western peoples, and especially its view of white cultural superiority and white supremacy, back to the country of their ancestors. In several important ways, they became substitute or proxy whites in their actions and orientations. The global circulating impact of white racist framing–and of the thinking, ideology, and action that grows out of it—remains one of the world’s most fundamental structural problems.

photo credit: Corey Ann

A man of mixed race has now reached the pinnacle of U.S. power only two generations since the end of Jim Crow. This is a tribute to American opportunity, and it is something that has never happened in another Western democracy — notwithstanding European condescension about “racist” America.

After this crowing about U.S. moral superiority over European countries, the editorial added this:

While Mr. Obama lost among white voters, as most modern Democrats do, his success is due in part to the fact that he also muted any politics of racial grievance. We have had in recent years two black Secretaries of State, black CEOs of our largest corporations, black Governors and Generals — and now we will have a President. One promise of his victory is that perhaps we can put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country. Mr. Obama has a special obligation to help do so.

Note that this conservative editorial writer is explicitly recognizing that Obama ran a successful campaign because he did not engage in the “politics of racial grievance.” That is, Obama ran to fit within a colorblind do-not-talk-about-race version of the dominant white racial frame, and this writer praises and values that effort. Numerous others are claiming we are now in a “post-racial” era.

In addition, this writer emphasizes that a few African Americans have recently served as tokens in highly visible political positions (only one elective), and this token reality can be viewed as an indication that white racism is no longer a barrier to high achievement. More than that, the writer calls aggressively on President-elect Obama to lead the effort to kill the “myth of racism.” This is an old effort that white leaders have engaged in for centuries, of ferreting out a few blacks to serve white interests and whitewash the reality of systemic racism.

The intensity of this denial of white racism’s continuing impact suggests that something racially significant is going on beneath the surface of this argument, in the white minds that run the Wall Street Journal. Is there a concern here that under Obama there might be a renewed discussion of U.S. racism and an aggressive enforcement of our weakly enforced civil rights laws? The irony of the argument about the “myth of racism” is lost on this writer, who earlier admitted that most whites did not vote for the first “mixed race” (not “black”!?) presidential candidate.

About the same time that I was reading this Journal article, I ran across an article in the South Florida Times (published in mid-October 2008) on Senator McCain’s major slaveholding ancestors—one that did not get much media attention at the time. Although he has so far been unwilling to acknowledge it, Senator McCain’s ancestors were major slaveholders, in a rural area community of Carroll County, Mississippi. Indeed, the white and black descendants of the McCain slaveholders now have a biannual Coming Home Reunion. McCain’s brother and other white relatives have attended, but Senator McCain has not attended or even acknowledged invitations to attend. Some of his distant black relatives have suggested strongly that McCain has tried to hide this family history. South Florida Times researchers discovered that McCain has many black relatives.

As the South Florida Times reports:

Sen. John McCain’s great, great grandfather, William Alexander McCain (1812-1863), fought for the Confederacy and owned a 2,000-acre plantation named Waverly in Teoc. The family dealt in the slave trade, and, according to official records, held at least 52 slaves on the family’s plantation. The enslaved Africans were likely used as servants, for labor, and for breeding more slaves. William McCain’s son, and Sen. John McCain’s great grandfather, John Sidney McCain (1851-1934), eventually assumed the duty of running the family’s plantation.

The paper also notes some of Senator McCain’s own racist history:

In addition to distancing himself from his black family members, John McCain has taken several positions on issues that have put him at odds with members of the larger black community. While running for the Republican Party nomination in 2000, he sided with protesters who were calling for the rebel battle flag to be removed from the South Carolina statehouse, only to alter that position later. “Some view it as a symbol of slavery. Others view it as a symbol of heritage,” John McCain said of the flag. “Personally, I see the battle flag as a symbol of heritage. I have ancestors who have fought for the Confederacy, none of whom owned slaves. I believe they fought honorably.’’

Well, actually his family did enslave lots of African Americans. The intimate connections of the US present to our highly racialized past must be constantly denied and ignored in order to maintain the post-racial ideology, a new spin on the old white racial frame that helps whites like the editors/writers in newspapers like the Wall Street Journal continue in their racism denial mode.

( photo credit: faeryboots )

We’re taking a short haitus from blogging.   We’ll be back to regular updates Jan.2, 2009.  Peace!

Hate Crimes, Old & New: Brent Staples has a nice column in yesterday’s New York Times about the contemporary exhibition of photographs of lynchings. Staples ponders the ethical dilemmas of showcasing these photographs in a time and place in which the perpetrators may still be alive and amoung the audience.   Curiously, Staples seems to locate “haters” as exclusively in the past.   There are plenty of examples around that suggest otherwise, including this case in Staten Island in which two white teens were arrested for the election night beating of a young black man and a hit-and-run.    And, this incident in which a 12-year-old black girl was pounced on by white officers who assumed she was a “prostitute” because she was wearing “tight shorts,” is just outrageous.    And, this incident reminds me of Judith Butler’s point in Excitable Speech that the State is often the worst perpetrator when it comes to hate-speech-and-acts.  (It’s not quite the same, Butler was referring to speech/acts like the entire criminal justice system and in particular, the death penalty, but the fact these cops were acting in their official capacity as agents of the State seems like a related point.)

South African Racism Persists: The election of Obama has reverberrated around the globe, and people in South Africa are contemplating the implications of his election for the demise of racism.  Back in November, South African novelist and Nobel Laureate, Nadine Gordimer, declared that Obama’s election marks the end of racism.   Chris Mbekela, a PhD student at Rhodes University, takes issue with Gordimer’s assessment.    Writing at the Daily Dispatch Online, Mbekela argues that racism persists globally and in the South African context.

Racism & Homophobia: Irene Monroe takes up the debate about racism and homophobia, and argues persuasively that Gay is Not the New Black (h/t: Adia) and Heather Tirado Gilligan says that we need to work on healing the rifts between us by building coalitions among straight folks and LGBT folks across racial lines (h/t: Joe).  The passage of Prop 8 gives “LGBT advocates the chance to show other minority groups that their causes are interconnected, legally and ethically.” Time to get to work, we’re all community organizers now.

Meghan O’Rourke, has a

O’Rourke notes that Yale Professor Alexander has four books,

the last, American Sublime, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A professor of African-American studies at Yale (from which she also matriculated), Alexander writes poems that are metaphorically and linguistically dense, layered, and subtle. Her work speaks about black experience. . . .But she can’t be said to privilege identity politics over aesthetics; her poems work more at being complex than didactic. In this sense, she’s an analogue to Obama, who doesn’t privilege identity politics over his strategy of inclusiveness.

Among other important works, Alexander has written a powerful poem about the extreme oppression visited on the enslaved African woman, Saartjie Baartman (1789-1815), whom virulently racist European whites termed the “The Venus Hottentot.” She was a Khoikhoi woman enticed by promises of splitting her earnings by the brother of her Dutch slaveowner in Africa if she would go to Europe to be physically exhibited to whites. Put on as a sideshow exhibit in Britain and France, she was forced to exhibit naked. After she died of illness in Europe in 1815, her remains– skeleton, genitals, and brain–were displayed by and for European “scientists” like an animal’s remains in a prominent Paris museum–even until the mid-1970s! Yet another aspect of the “Western civilization” some of our leading pundits like to brag about.

In her poem Alexander attacks this extreme exploitation and its associated scientific racism more eloquently that we can ever put into prose. I recommend the portion of her poem posted on her website here. Her GrayWolf press collection, The Venus Hottentot is described here.