Pat’s Polemics

This was elicited by comments on MSNBC by a host commentator, Rattigan.
Again, we have the stupid, racist, uninformed b.s. elicited by the word Ebonics. Ignorant people, too lazy to google African-American Vernacular English or just plain Black English - how hard is that? - continue to make jokes about the speech of Black people as if we were still in an episode of Amos 'n' Andy (note the " 'n' " to denote Black people's inability to speak properly as White people do. We know all White people always fully enunciate the d of 'and').

This crap will continue as long as:
#1 racism toward Blacks exists
#2 people are too lazy to read a book or even a wiki article

So it looks like we are in for a long siege - probably centuries. Even Black people join in the stupidity.

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Recently I blogged on a scene from HBO's Treme where a tour bus pulled up to a group of Black New Orleanians initiating a funeral ceremony. The mode of "funeralizing" the man was deeply African. The driver of the bus did not at first recognize what was going on and bulled his way into the gathering from the window of his bus. Once he realized it was a funeral and these people were residents of this ruined neighborhood, he showed respect and pulled away. The scene as the group watched in wonderment and bemusement as the bus trundled off was poignant.

Its poignancy lay in...

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My wife and I went to a graduation where we parked in a huge parking lot and stupidly forgot to mark where our car was. We wandered around pretty much by ourselves since we had exited early but finally split up to look for it. I took my grandson with me and he found it, so I drove down to the end of the row to go back up it to pick up my wife.

I was stopped and told I couldn't go that way, I could only exit. I argued with the parking lot policeman but he was adamant, so I swung around and went back up the row and squeezed between two pillars set up to block exit. Of course, I got yelled at but when I explained, this guy told me the guy at the other end had a walkie-talkie and could tell one of the attendants in a cart just to pick her up. So I did that.

The guy at the other end this time was Black. He called the pick-up in. I told him how upset my wife would be, wandering around in the Arizona heat, etc. He tried to mollify me, saying she'd be fine. She called me on my cell and was p.o.'d, saying they were driving past her (probably looking for a White woman since I'm White but she's Black), etc. So I started again complaining about how upset she was going to be, how much trouble I was in, etc. And he kept mollifying me, telling me they had just radioed that they had picked her up and that she'd be here in a minute and everything would be OK....... then the truck pulled up and she stepped out.
"Oh, she Black. You in big trouble, man."

If you can't appreciate this, you might be in Obama's shoes. There is a lot about African-American culture he doesn't know b/c he is not an African-American, he's a Kenyan-American.

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Stalin was a major leader of WW II, one of our allies, that's it. That's why he's there. If you want him gone for moral atrocities he committed, how about all the American slave holders whose busts and paintings occupy every niche in Washington. Will you demand they be removed? No, because murdering and enslaving Ukrainians just isn't the same as murdering and enslaving Black people. Maybe I can help you see the equivalency - imagine your daughter being conducted to the bedroom of the master for him to use any way he pleases. Does that get to you? Now your boys sent to feed the ovens of a sugar cane plantation where flames reach out from time to time to engulf the boys. How about that image? Does anything reach through this armor Americans wear when it comes to atrocities? When have we ever admitted our own? The Klan still operates in my wife's hometown in Texas. The Klan killed fewer Blacks than Stalin killed kulaks - so who's counting?

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Mel Gibson's periodic meltdowns serve as fodder for columnists' essays on the state of race relations. The comments attached illustrate both the lack of a grasp of what is going on and a strong desire to simplify issues and stick our collective heads in the sand.

First, the fact that Gibson's conversation was private and so falls under the rubric of "when haven't we all said something dumb" fails the IQ test. The point is, when Gibson thought the cameras were off, he let go with what he really thinks. You can use the stereotype of Black buck rapists because it works. The assumption on his part is that it will work with his girlfriend. Where would he get that assumption if not from conversations he has had with many people? He is not an American, so he had to learn that that is the quintissential American threat - a big, Black buck.

Next, he is only one person and so cannot possibly represent anything about America as a whole. The point of the article was that we seldom get to hear what people say in private and, due to Gibson's celebrity and stupidity, we got a peek. To ignore this eruption is to dismiss the underlying assumptions alluded to above: I can say this b/c it will resonate. The writer of the column suggests Gibson's utterances may be representative of what a lot of people say in private.

Then we have the canard about African-Americans and other groups being proud of their heritage but Whites cannot express such pride. As a school teacher, I never once encountered a group of White kids who wanted to start a "White club" whose motives were not to set themselves up a superior to other groups. When they objected that the Black or Hispanic or Native American groups were exclusionary, I had to point out to them that all of those groups had members of other ethnicities in them as was firm district policy. When I added that that implied that their group would have to be open to other ethnicities as well, they lost interest.

Seldom did we get to the overall point

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A member of a listserv argued with me some years ago that the findings in The Bell Curve, specifically that certain groups are superior or inferior in intelligence as ascertained by intelligence tests, were "empirical". The word is defined thus:
originating in or based on observation or experience
The most explosive part of the authors', Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, findings was the make up of some of the groups; they relied on old racial groupings, Black, White, Asian, etc., to compare people. Blacks, of course, fell at the bottom of the hierarchy, Asians at the top, and, oddly enough, Jews, a non-racial group, at the pinnacle. I will report in detail on these findings after I finish the long book - well written, BTW.

But I wanted to retort concerning the word empirical. During one of Murray's book tours, a man in the audience brought up The Bell Curve. He told Murray that he, a White American, had spent some time in West Africa and had had a chance to talk to a lot of people. He found them to be perfectly intelligent and reasonable. He sounded sincerely perplexed that Murray's finding concerning Africans indicated they were of low intelligence.

Murray's reply was to refer him to more recent testing which replicated the earlier findings on which Murray had based his work.

Now, who is being empirical, the guy who relies on tests administered years ago by persons unknown or someone who interacted with the test subjects?

I've dealt with this book elsewhere in my blog and will discuss it more later. The book generated a huge reaction. It is obvious that we have a lot of people who have never interacted in a personal way with a great many African-Americans who are perfectly willing to apply their limited experience as police officers, military officers, health professionals, social workers, teachers, etc. to the entire group of people in order to agree or disagree with The Bell Curve. The man who interacted with Black Africans was not developing a full-blown theory, he was just reacting to his limited interaction with the subjects of the testing and expressing his perplexity at finding to reason to believe these people to be less intelligent as a group than any other group. Murray could only rely on more paper work.

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Recently I went to dinner with relatives and one boy of 15 was there. As he walked to the table, he was dancing and I realized he was dancing to an irregular beat, supplying his own underlying pattern. The beat, it turned out, was a large, industrial bread-making machine. The whop-whop of the paddle provided the irregular pattern to which he was supplying the underlying pattern.

That immediately brought to mind Marshall Stearn's book The Story of Jazz in which he recounts the "apocryphal" tale of Congolese natives dancing to the beats of an ill-tuned generator engine.

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Is there something wrong with me that this brouhaha seems another one of those hold overs from the 70s? It smacks of the phony issues raised by groups trying to gain some power. I am sure there are some young people and no doubt some people my age who just react to that term as if they are the only people in the world the U.S. census is trying to reach. In which case, Negro should be thrown out b/c they associate it with White resistence to Black progress.

OK, trip to another planet: census researchers find there are elderly Black people who still look for the word Negro on the form. I am old enough to remember when Black was an insult and African-American.......... well, my wife tells the story of how she told her mother that they, the family, were Africans. My mother-in-law replied: you may be an African, but I'm not.

How many African-Americans use the term Negro to identify themselves> Probably not a whole lot. BUT THE CENSUS COUNTS EVERYBODY
and if their research indicates some people might not recognize themselves in the words Black or African-American, they need to put it in there.

So what am I missing? Let me know. But PLEASE don't tell me how you feel personally about the word. That is not the point.

Here's something to think about. I got 2 CDs of a popular band in Benin. A number of pieces sound very similar to Haitian songs and to the pop Haitian band Boukman Experience. But, the music on the CDs was recorded in the 70s, long before Boukman formed.

So are we looking at a deep response of Ewe/Fon/Dahomean musical culture to Western instruments here?

Another stalwart has left us. One of those original people who accepted me into their church even though I never joined, never even became a Christian, in fact, has passed. There were about half a dozen people who shared a good deal with me. Brother Brown, which is all I ever called him, welcomed me from the get-go with his huge grin and ebullient manner. In one way or another, all the stalwarts did. In their own manner, all the people in the church did.

I will throw in here something they were probably aware of but did not say anything about: I was a very young White kid coming to this Black church in a very segregated society. I remember one time driving by a construction site, looking down in the ditch and seeing Brother Brown digging away. I slowed down and yelled out the window, "Hey, Brother Brown!" He looked up, saw me and identified me, grinned and waved and went back to work. I found out at his funeral that he had worked for that construction company for 20 years and arrived one hour early every day for work.

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