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–Motormanmark’s Monologue on Race.  Motormanmark.com

 

 

The day before MLK Day, I attended a service in the Harlem church where my wife sings–the church where we were married.  The pastor talked to the overwhelmingly Black congregation about everything but the epidemic of violence in the Black culture and community.  After the service, I confronted him with it, and all he did was smile uncomfortably.  He could not find a single word to speak about the applicability of the main theme of King’s social activism–non-violence–to today’s African American cultural regression.

 

Let me start:  When I talk about people descended from US slaves, I use the political label, “Black.” 

 

Of course, the term “African American” is nice, but refers to people like our president, too; who, though they can be assumed to have experienced social stigma just like Blacks, really have not inherited half the burdens of Black people. 

 

Read these statistics carefully:

 

About Black men:

 

Only 41% graduate high school.

14% who are of voting age have lost their right to vote due to felony convictions.

One in three between the ages of 20 and 29 years old is under correctional supervision or control.

Half in their twenties are jobless.

One in every 20 is incarcerated, compared with one in 155 White men.

The Black male homicide rate is seven times the White male rate.

Life expectancy is 7.1 years less than for White men, 7.5 years less than for Black women and 12.7 years less than for White women.

 

 

Further:

 

69% of Black children in the US cannot read at grade level in the 4th grade.

45% of Black children live below the poverty line.

One in 14 Black children has a parent in jail or prison.

67% of Black children (up from 17% in 1967) are born out of wedlock.

2006 Net worth of Black families was $6,100 – Net worth of White families was ten times that: $67,000.  While constituting roughly 13% of the total population, Black America represents nearly 30% of America’s poor.

 

African Americans have an intimate partner homicide rate four times that of whites.

Though only 13% of the U.S. population, Blacks commit more than half of all rapes and robberies and 60% of all U.S. murders.

 

…People like Barack Obama, Sidney Poitier, or Colin Powell are surely sympathetic, but they cannot boast having championed over the burden of this reality, the way someone like Oprah, Spike Lee, Toni Morrison, or Andrew Young can. 

 

“African American” has this flaw, but it is at least a direct, honest, and confident attempt at a label for an identity.

 

There was a time I favored the phrase, “People of Color,” but that was when I was in a more pitying mood towards Blacks, didn’t give Blacks the credit of being able to handle their own self-esteem.  Nowadays, I hear a White calling a Black a Person of Color and I see a patronizing sycophant.

 

“People of color” is an obvious attempt to lump Blacks in with Latinos, as if Blacks need to be watered down with a group less statistically tormented by criminality and violence–a more respectable minority–as if there’s something wrong with being Black alone.  The two groups don’t have a whole hell of a lot in common that they couldn’t include poor Whites to ride along with.  If you want to talk about the US poor as a class, just say it: “poor people.”  It was good enough for Martin Luther King.  And he was never afraid to let the “Negro,” which he proudly identified as, stand alone in discussions.

 

As for skin having color… well, I’m as white as the newfallen snow, but still, you put my hand against a clump of snow and in comparison it looks bright red–quite colorful.  “People of color” has nothing to do with color.  The term is a comparison to White, and then, as if afraid to say “dark,” it has to find something that sounds nicer, as if dark isn’t nice.  Any way you look at it, the term is all about White people–it is not about defining Blacks, but undefining Blacks from Whites, and, if you really have respect for yourself, why the hell do you want your label to have everything to do with a bunch of other people??

 

The fear that honest and straightforward rationality might lead to something bad for Blacks is an integral part of the problem that keeps us, 40 years after civil rights, from achieving racial equality of real conditions.

 

The day before election day, Michel Martin of National Public Radio, who moderates NPR’s show, “Tell Me More,” had, as her guest, the former Grand Wizard or Dragon or Hoo-ha or whatever of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke.  Don’t ask why she chose him; Your guess is as good as mine.

 

“Tell Me More” is one of many of NPR’s lame attempts at having a show with an African American cultural character to it.  Since the vast majority of folks who listen to NPR are White, these things are very tame, with the feel of a pop Christmas movie starring Queen Latifah.  The show features a “Mocha Talk” between Martin and some sisters.  Fridays, she turns to a group of men she calls her “Barber Shop.” 

 

Still, it’s NPR’s best attempt so far, I’d say.  I was listening to “News & Notes with Ed Gordon” one Saturday afternoon and nearly choked on my coffee as Pastor Floyd Flake of Queens and Evangelist Creflo Dollar of Georgia ranted lewdly against homosexuality as a “perversion” that “somebody has got to speak up against,” equating homosexual sex with eating “off the toilet stool,” exactly the kind of talk that was once used against interracial relations by people with much less an intellectual endowment to build from than these two flaky ministers.  Ed Gordon seemed oblivious.

 

Tavis Smiley, who ran a tamer NPR show, quit to do his own syndicated chat fest where he and Harvard professor, Cornel West, (who seems to be his guest every other week,) try to imagine themselves as pioneers over oppression.  They spend much time talking around oppression, but they never state one solid idea they might have to solve or specifically define the problems distressing African America.

 

And, of course, the problems are immense.

 

This past year Barack Obama called for a national dialogue or conversation or whatnot of race.  We were supposed to talk with each other, right? 

 

Ha. 

 

An African American political commentator featured on a “Face the Nation” roundtable shortly after Obama’s race speech bragged how Blacks are comfortable with the topic of race.  “It’s White people who don’t like to talk about race.” 

 

Baloney.  NO one talks about race.  Not me, not you, not Obama, not Tavis Smiley, not Michel Martin.  Maybe in your own home, to your own spouse, but not out there in public.  The media talks about race, but not really.  For instance, it amazes me how unaware most people–White and Black–are of the ridiculously bad state of African America.  When was the last time you heard someone discuss the peculiarity of violent criminality among Black people? 

 

Well, actually, for the first time in years just in the past month a study came out revealing brand new violent crime statistics that show teenaged killings of Blacks rising 40% since the year 2000.  40%!  This statistic is so outrageous that it actually got some real media coverage, (maybe due to the racial import of the Obama inauguration.)

 

Still, the resulting flaccid discussions that bubbled up in the media did not even aspire to tilt at the windmill of Black violence.  

 

Back to David Duke and Michel Martin. 

 

Duke starts into his schtick.  He doesn’t hate anybody.  He just wants to separate us.  She tries to argue with him and really loses control of the interview. 

 

He cleans her clock. 

 

Click HERE  and judge for yourself from the edited recording “Tell Me More” released.

 

So, then Duke starts really talking about race.  He lifts his foot and decisively steps squarely off the comfortable mat of talk show blather and stomps dead-on into the forbidden zone, the frozen zone: the taboo subject of race.

 

He says lynchings historically victimized Whites much more than Blacks, and, usually, only after they committed heinous crimes.

 

Rather than condemning all lynchings and refocusing the argument over the racially-motivated lynchings of Blacks, Martin chomps on Duke’s bait and tries to say his facts are not truthful.

 

After he’s raked her over the coals of logic, the clever fool strikes again.  He claims that in 2005, the last year statistics were supplied by the US government, according to the Department of Justice, there were 37,460 White rape victims from Black male rapists and 10 or less Black victims of White male rape.  If this were reversed, Duke argued, there would be hell to pay.

 

Martin tries to argue, but she is absolutely lost.  She ends up intimating Duke’s statistics are wrong again and promising to correct them on her blog later in time. 

 

Karl Malden played a lot of bad guys in the movies and on stage.  I remember him in an interview explaining that the key to his talent was in his effort always to acknowledge that his characters had a reason to believe they were good.  And, I agree.  Adolf Hitler thought he was a good person, I’m sure.  He wasn’t evil.  Evil is an asinine idea.  No, Hitler just really believed Jews were devils and he really believed it was his role to lead the world to a righteous way.  Why would a person capable of killing rats, who truly believes Jewish people are the same as rats, feel any compunction over exterminating them? 

 

Sure, there are people who go around murdering people for the enjoyment of it, but a person who gets enjoyment out of that is obviously a nutjob–the subject here is not mental/psychological disease.  I’m talking about the Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis, the German WWII-era citizenry who cheered Nazism, the Americans who voted for carpet-bombing Richard Nixon or who watched FOX News’s long-range, wide-angled, cityscape fireworks-vision with beaming smiles as our missiles and bombs shock-and-awe slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and lawn-mowered over leagues of pathetic, wan-eyed, barn-booted, poverty-stricken Iraqi soldiers like their lives weren’t worth spit.  

 

Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” is by now the oldest saw no one really gets.  Regular people who think they are good people are capable of doing very bad things.

 

So, like scratching a sore, Martin invites this Duke character to her show, and then, when he’s sitting there in her space, she pushes him away, revolted by him.  She cannot take Karl Malden’s advice to find the shared humanity in her subject, as the David Dukes of the world are to her pretty much what Black people are to the David Dukes.  I suspect she would not like to use a public drinking fountain after him.

 

What they both have in common is a belief in evil.

 

I guess Michel Martin expected a more clear-cut delineation between good and evil, an interview that she could drop-kick to show everyone how good Michel Martin is at clobbering racists on the eve of Obama’s election.

 

Instead, she got a statistic that she feared the power of so much that it immobilized her.

 

37,460 White rape victims from Black male rapists and 10 or less Black victims of White male rape.

 

Two weeks later, a snatch of conversation was added to her blog between one of her staffers and a Dept of Justice official who claimed Duke interpreted the stats incorrectly, but, in his explanation, it is apparent he is really saying the statistics were possibly flawed as the sample size was too small.  (How much you want to bet the next time the DOJ publishes that report, they’re not going to include the racial category?)

 

Then “Tell Me More” staffers cut the online forum off, closing discussion.

 

They need to change the name of that show.

 

Why didn’t Martin know NOT to question Duke’s statistics?  Why was it so incomprehensible to her that a group of people that are in such a bad state as are Black men could be capable of producing a horrifying statistic?  All right, the meaning Duke was drawing from the statistic was obviously false, even if the statistic was true, but, hell, why do you think Duke was perusing those statistics to begin with? 

 

Of course, the Duke angle to it–that Blacks are naturally flawed on account of racial inferiority, which Martin never found her way to extract–is not worthy of wasting even a moment’s thought, but don’t we need to talk about why so many Black men are violent? 

 

(Other interesting topics, much too taboo for Martin’s show, that could be drawn from this statistic: Are Black women just much more tough than White women?!  Or are they improperly perceived in that way?  What are the differences between the way both Black and White men of all character perceive White women versus the way they view Black women?  And, for the ultimate taboo: Do people think Black men are more attracted to White women than to Black women??  Are they?!  She could have then brought in a panel of Black men and asked them there, right in front of Duke.  That would’ve sent Duke sprawling on his ass, shoving Duke’s subliminal racist insult right back into his face.) 

 

I need to pause here to comfort anyone who might be offended as I go forward: Of course the vast majority of Black men are NOT violent.  Statistics regarding group delineations must be thoughtfully examined.  The statement, for instance: “White men constitute the vast majority of all sunburn cases;” is true, but that does not change the (as-some-would perceive as seemingly contradictory) fact that the vast majority of White guys are NOT sunburned.

 

At the same time, I don’t wish to separate Black men out as though they’ve got nothing to do with the problem of Black violence.

 

Take this example: There is another guy besides David Duke who really does talk about race.  His name is Chris Rock.  He tickles people with the taboo of race until they can hardly breathe.  He has a routine where he says Black people are the worst racists:

 

We hate Black people, too! 

 

Everything White people don’t like about Black people Black people really don’t like about Black people. 

 

There’s some shit going on with Black people right now.  There’s like a civil war going on with Black people. There’s two sides: There’s Black people… and there’s niggaz. 

 

Niggaz have got-to-go! 

 

Every time Black people want to have a good time, ignorant-assed niggaz fucking it up.  Can’t do nothin’!  Can’t keep a disco open more than three weeks.  Can’t go to a movie the first week it comes out—why?!  ‘Cause niggaz are shooting at the screen!”  

 

You get it.

 

The humor in this routine comes from creating dangerous tension by admitting the fact we all know but don’t dare speak that there really are a considerably larger percentage of dangerous Black people than there are dangerous Whites, and then relieving it with the comforting assertion that there is some buffering difference between the dangerous Blacks and the good Blacks.

 

But, this is just a small step forward for racial dialogue.

 

We don’t need to waste time recognizing the “good” Blacks.”  I mean, if we really don’t have any doubt about how good Blacks are, we don’t.  No, to really get anywhere, we need to focus on the violent Black people–and figure out how to change them or at least keep them from being raised in such a way as makes them violent.

 

Michel Martin’s inability to accept that the most-well-known racist in the country came up with a statistic that portrays the comparatively hyperviolent proclivities of the Black male population group in the most negative way reveals her failure to understand the power of cultural corruption. 

 

You cannot raise your kids up chanting thrilling raps and watching movies over their parents’ shoulders that make crime, drugs, and violence seem adventurous without asking for things to get worse.  You cannot turn back a growing tide of violent culture by using violence in the home on the children you are raising.  You cannot just ignore the seething problem of Black violent criminality, as Black people have been doing for as long as I can remember.  You should expect the stats to get worse, much worse.

 

Compared to the other large racial groups in the US, there are much too many violent Black people.

 

You can connect the violence with a heritage of slavery, (as I do,) if you’d like, slaves being the victims of violence, forced to incorporate it into their culture.  You don’t have to say it’s Black people’s faults that there is so much violence among Blacks.  But you must acknowledge it as a peculiar problem that does not replicate in comparable percentages in poor communities of other racial make-up.

 

Studies of criminal violence have demonstrated a strong link to early childhood family violence and lack of nurturance, but family violence does not always produce criminally violent adults.  In other words, though it is not uncommon to find that the siblings of violent criminals are not violent, it is extremely rare to find a violent criminal who was not beaten as a child.  A family where the children are beaten or are generally treated without dignity may turn out a full crew of children who have turned out well despite the abuse, but one will be bad.  That’s why you should never listen to those people who shrug and say, “My momma whipped me with the cord from the iron, and I turned out fine.”  Ask about their siblings.  Or watch that person sit down after a long day at work.  See what comes up glowing on their DVD.  “Saw,” “Apocalypto,” “Hostel,”….

 

I recently watched Tyler Perry’s, “The Marriage Counselor,” dropped into the crew room DVD player by an African American church-lady conductor.  This recording of a moralizing stage play, animated with humor and religiously pious ballads, is distinctly addressed to Blacks.  There’s a scene where the main character, a hard-working husband who’s been cheated on, faces off with the rich, arrogant, cocaine-addicted and lighter-skinned other-man.  As he punches the man’s face over and over again in a way that only brings to mind the Popeye the Sailor Man cartoon (after Popeye has glugged-down his spinach,) his father jokes, “I guess light skin ain’t in this year.”  The violence has the live Cleveland audience of Black folks roaring with excitement.

 

The violence is as righteous as the religion.

 

Still dogged by the indignity of slavery, Black America has something to prove.  They must prove they are better than how they’ve been treated.  Pride is seen as a way out.  Like a dazed boxer trying to show the ref he’s up to finish the bout, Black people have no choice but to hold up their differences from Whites–those things that make them lose–and cross their eyes until those traits look like assets.

 

Well, I’ve got news for Black people:  You are not a Zulu phoenix rising from the ashes.  You are more like that boxer shoving fists at the air.

 

You can disassociate yourself, sure.  You can take the Chris Rock approach, see those other people as “niggaz.”  Rock’s routine dramatically reveals how Black people have left their “bad” people hanging, swinging.  Rock knows this.  He’s getting it out there in his way.

 

But Rock is a comedian.  The assumption that disapproval from one side of the Black community to the other is a social policy for change makes no sense. 

 

Real social change requires a conscious realignment of patterns of thinking, often a difficult sacrifice of important pieces of one’s own identity.

 

Blacks need to ignore White people in more ways than one.  At the risk of never developing a “Black” identity, Black children should be taught to find their own identity, without regard to what White people are or are not.  And if something is cancerous for Black culture, it needs to be removed, without any regard for what Whites will think.  Kicking and screaming, if necessary, it must be removed.  It might make you feel like you are acting White to leave behind some feature of parenting that was so prevalent in your neighborhood, but that should not matter even slightly. 

 

·        All Black parents must stop hitting their kids, and they should not tolerate the slightest violence from any adult or child in the home.  There is nothing that physical aggression will enable your child to excel at, and if your neighborhood requires your child be a good fighter, you need to move.  There is nothing weaker than an adult who has been raised to be a tough guy. 

 

·        Whatever is demanded of a child must be practiced by a parent.  Eye contact, listening, respect. 

 

·        Black men must do all that, plus Black men have to learn–not only to hug and kiss their kids–but to publicly castigate a brother they see who treats his kids like they’re accessories.  Children walk beside their parents, hand-in-hand, not three steps behind.  Children who are raised not to think of themselves as precious and worthy of their parents praise and affection become adults who are capable of any small, pathetic act.

 

·        You like that horror/murder cinema?  Fine, that’s no crime.  But do not watch it with your kids around.  Pause button.  Volume control.  Headphones, if necessary.  And, it will take a while before you get comfortable with it, but you can change your language to be less foul, less aggressive. 

 

·        And do not think for a moment that a boy needs to be raised “like a boy” to grow up to be “a man.”  If your boy is going to be gay, that already happened when his DNA got churned out; There’s nothing you can (or should) do to mold a kid who is destined to turn out gay into a straight.  Being mean or cold, or “tough” is just being selfish, and failing to make the sacrifices needed to change yourself into a better parent.

 

The point is, you are trying to change the course of a flowing river.  It is a difficult, arduous, constant effort you must undertake from now until your child is 18-years old. 

 

Not 12.  Eighteen.  

 

But the next generation will have less of that garbage in its culture, will be able to think more clearly, will be able to find its way to a new identity.

 

Sure, there are plenty of arguments those who are resistant to change can make:  There are plenty of violent Whites (Yeah, but there are ten times as many Whites as Blacks;)  Uneven incarceration rates caused by White racism turns Black boys into criminally violent adults (No.  Violent crime is different by nature than non-violent crime.  A violent criminal is a different creature entirely from, say, a drug dealer.  You can see a violent criminal developing from the earliest ages, but drug dealers almost never branch out into violent crime later in their careers.  Also: even for first offenders, violent crime statistics show the same proportionally vastly higher representation of Blacks over Whites;) Black people need to resist assimilation and maintain Black culture. (Blacks don’t have their own culture, but lost it hundreds of years back and were forced to assimilate to one dominated by the slaver.)  A White guy like me has no right to be blogging about Black people, (Well, as soon as someone other than Chris Rock and David Duke pick up the topic of race, I’ll be happy to move on to the next most important US domestic issue.)

 

Obama’s presidency is only a wonderful inspiration.  When it comes to Black America, real productive change is not yet even a concept.