Woman killed at K.K.K. initiation

This one physically made me sick.  From the New York Times yesterday:

An Oklahoma woman invited to a rural Louisiana campsite for a Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual was shot and killed after she asked to be taken back to town, the sheriff of a parish near New Orleans said. Eight people were arrested after the authorities found the woman’s body hidden under some brush on the side of a road several miles from the remote campsite, about 60 miles north of New Orleans. Investigators found weapons, several flags and six Klan robes at the campsite, Sheriff Jack Strain of St. Tammany Parish said. Sheriff Strain said the group’s leader, Raymond Foster, 44, shot and killed the woman after a fight broke out when she tried to leave. Mr. Foster was charged with second-degree murder.

Friedman: Obama victory final end to Civil War

Where I live, the Civil War is sometimes frequently referred to as the “late great unpleasantness.” In the New York Times this morning, Thomas Friedman argues that the Civil War could not have truly ended until the election of Barack Obama, or someone like him:

And so it came to pass that on Nov. 4, 2008, shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended, as a black man — Barack Hussein Obama — won enough electoral votes to become president of the United States.

A civil war that, in many ways, began at Bull Run, Virginia, on July 21, 1861, ended 147 years later via a ballot box in the very same state. For nothing more symbolically illustrated the final chapter of America’s Civil War than the fact that the Commonwealth of Virginia — the state that once exalted slavery and whose secession from the Union in 1861 gave the Confederacy both strategic weight and its commanding general — voted Democratic, thus assuring that Barack Obama would become the 44th president of the United States.

This moment was necessary, for despite a century of civil rights legislation, judicial interventions and social activism — despite Brown v. Board of Education, Martin Luther King’s I-have-a-dream crusade and the 1964 Civil Rights Act — the Civil War could never truly be said to have ended until America’s white majority actually elected an African-American as president.

Yes we did.

WAWP

There’s a lot of good stuff on the blogs this morning.  Over at TooSense, he’s taking it to Whinin’ Ass White People (WAWP).  Check this:

Memo to my white brothers and sisters: we own 95% of the fucking country, you morons! We have the best jobs; the best land; the best schools; the most tax breaks; and generations of accumulated material wealth. All but two Supreme Court Justices have been white, and every single President so far has been white. The vast majority of elected officials in this country have been and are white. The vast majority of media figures are white. Almost every wealthy person in this country is white (seriously, take away Oprah and Bob Johnson, what’s left?) HOW THE FUCK IS ANYONE SUPPOSED TO BE OPPRESSING US WHEN WE OWN EVERYTHING?

Stop whining, white folks. There’s nothing worse than a WAWP. White people whining is exactly like those spoiled little girls on “My Sweet Sixteen” screaming because daddy only got them a Hummer instead of a Lexus. It’s not just disingenuous, it’s obscene.

We’re not victims, we’re not oppressed, we’re not disadvantaged. Nobody is holding us back from anything because of our race. We’re in the catbird seat. We won the wars, the toys are ours. We have nothing, absolutely nothing, to justify crying in our beer. Individually, a lot of us are hurting because of the state of the economy. But collectively? We have the cow, the milk, and the cream. So shut the fuck up about being victims, okay?

What he said.

 

In case you *still* think we’re making this up

H/T Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

This might piss some people off

You know what?  I’m “totally comfortable with that.”  (Warning:  not worksafe.)

This Week In Blackness, Ep #10

John Lewis knows of which he speaks

John Lewis knows.  John Lewis was there.  When John Lewis speaks to issues of violence incited by racial hatred, people should listen.  John Lewis is speaking now, to the McCain / Palin camp.  Unfortunately, McCain is swatting him away like a bothersome fly.  He should not be so cavalier. 

Here is what John Lewis had to say, tried to remind us:

George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights.  Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

Here’s McCain’s response:

I am saddened that John Lewis, a man I’ve always admired, would make such a brazen and baseless attack on my character and the character of the thousands of hardworking Americans who come to our events to cheer for the kind of reform that will put America on the right track.

And then McCain called on Obama to disavow Lewis’ remarks.  Character, Sen. McCain?  Where?

**Update:  Via spokesman Bill Burton, here is the Obama campaign’s response:

Sen. Obama does not believe that John McCain or his policy criticism is in any way comparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies.

But John Lewis was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric that John McCain himself personally rebuked just last night, as well as the baseless and profoundly irresponsible charges from his own running mate that the Democratic nominee for president of the United States ‘pals around with terrorists.’

As Barack Obama has said himself, the last thing we need from either party is the kind of angry, divisive rhetoric that tears us apart at a time of crisis when we desperately need to come together. That is the kind of campaign Sen. Obama will continue to run in the weeks ahead.

The McCain campaign needs to understand what it is dealing with

I mentioned yesterday that John McCain had stood up for Barack Obama’s honor when confronted with just how out of hand his supporters were getting.  There are probably many reasons for this, not the least of which are increasingly frightening poll numbers for him (for pure poll pornography, head over to fivethirtyeight.com).  Another reason could be that outside pressure is increasing for him to stop his dangerous fear mongering.  I wondered on October 7 if the McCain camp really understood what it was doing:

This is irresponsible and wreckless and shows the lack of foresight, lack of seeing things out to their possible conclusions that we can ill afford in the country’s highest executives. 

Two days later, I quoted Ta-Nehisi Coates on the subject (see here), who was much more explicit than I.  Since then, we’ve seen more and more of this kind of calling out of McCain.  Yesterday, in the Baltimore Sun, Op-Ed writer Frank Schaeffer wrote:

John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as “not one of us,” I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.

Schaeffer’s creds go beyond the Sun:  he worked to get McCain elected in 2000 and, in return, McCain, “…wrote an endorsement of one of (his) books about military service.”  McCain’s own are turning on him, recognizing that what he is doing is unleashing powers that are simply beyond his control.  Schaeffer hits the nail on the head when this Baltimore writer pens:

Your rallies are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs. 

McCain and Palin need to dial it back … and fast.  Over at Too Sense, they put this all in perspective:

The country is on fire, and McCain is pissing gasoline.

Coming from the South, and being a student of her history, I can tell you that these are forces that cannot easily be contained, once unleashed. The old stories of blacks usurping white power during Reconstruction have not gone away, nor have the tales of black violence during the most tumultuous phase of the Civil Rights Movement. These resentments have been out there, covered by a thin coat of anti-welfare rhetoric (and now the effort to blame the mortgage crisis on poor black people who had the nerve to buy houses).

They never went away, they just became the subtext for much of our political discourse. Only now, they are less and less a matter of subtext. They are being brought to the forefront, and inflamed. To all those thinking that somehow America had “transcended race” via Obama’s nomination, here is your undenaible proof that no such transcendance has taken place. For all of the Benetton ads, Cosby Shows, and “Yes We Can” videos, we have not excised the emotional cancer of our collective past. At most, it has only ever been in remission, waiting for the chance to grow again.

Man in LA: “Keep the n*&#er out of office”

There are days when I wonder if I’m in the Twilight Zone.  I live in AL, so you’d think I’d be used to this shit.  And yet I’m still shocked when it’s in black and white, so to speak.  From The Smoking Gun, h/t JJP:

Angered by a delay in the receipt of his voter registration card, a Louisiana man today threatened to shoot election officials, claiming that he urgently needed to cast a ballot to “keep the nigger out of office,” according to police. Wade Williams, 75, was arrested this morning on a felony terrorizing charge after allegedly calling the Registrar of Voters and warning that he would come to the state office and empty his shotgun unless he got his registration card. Using profanity and racial slurs, Williams told a state official “about needing to vote to ‘keep the nigger out of office,” according to an Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Office affidavit, a copy of which you’ll find here. Though the document does not name the candidate to which Williams is so violently opposed, it seems likely he was referring to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. After being arrested at his Monroe home, Williams was booked into the Ouachita Correctional Center, where the below mug shot was snapped. En route to the jail, he “continued his ‘tirade’ about niggers and also stated that he had a shotgun, but had it hidden at his residence,” reported Lt. Michael Judd.

And while we’re laughing

H/T to Jack and Jill Politics.  This Week In Blackness, episode #5, on White Privelege.  They mention Tim Wise’s piece on White Privelege, which we talked about here.  Y’all enjoy.

Speaking of racism

I’m late to the party on this one (thanks, Sherry) and honestly just too pissed to be coherent, so I’m gonna send you to Alternet.org for the details.  The details are really, really, really good.  Really.  Go read.

Obama Waffles