Donald Trump can claim to the hills how he is not a racist. But I know he is. His attempts to garner favor from Black voters have not fallen on deaf ears. I have been listening, and I do not like what I am hearing.
Those are my aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, mother and father he is talking about when he says Black communities are in the worst shape they’ve ever been in, “ever, ever, ever.” Just. No.
And his solution? Drum roll…………..more STOP AND FRISK!
Stop and frisk (Terry stops) in every Black community in America. Donald Trump thinks emphasizing Terry stops in the Black community will reduce violence. The same stop and frisk that, contrary to Trump’s claims on how well it worked, did not yield any attributable reduction in violent deaths in New York City. The same stop and frisk that was declared an unconstitutional, illegal infringement on the rights of the minorities targeted under the policy.
No matter! Donald trump knows better than the generals! The Donald knows better than the NYPD and the U.S. federal court of appeals and the Fourteenth Amendment.
Maybe that’ll be Trump’s next real estate investment – a for-profit prison to hold all the big, “bad dudes” he locks up thanks to stop and frisk.
Because it has become obvious Donald Trump knows better than Black people what is good for Black people – the view inside a jail cell.
If you follow the femme rampage that is my blog space, you might have experience my utter disgust with a certain local radio personality. Let’s not mince words: I think Mark Madden is a racist jerk.
Now, that is not really saying much. So many people say racist, insensitive things nowadays, it would be impossible to preserve the meaning of the word racism if we attached that label to every person who tried to argue that Black people should “turn white” to get ahead in their careers. (NOT!) It has become politically correct to apply a hierarchy to racist behavior such that, those who say things that are only moderately offensive to minorities are labeled “insensitive,” while reserving the harsher “prejudiced” label for blatant discriminators and the full-on “racist” label for imbecilic, teenaged assholes who attack the first Black person they encounter and murder him by running him over with a truck.
Well, the lovingly racist radio jock Mark Madden took to the airwaves once again this past week to rail against another supposed injustice – this time aimed at him. It seems poor, portly little Markie is mad because Krystal Cozzo of the Pittsburgh Passion called him a fag or something.
OH NO! Poor Mark Madden!
He got called a mean name. He feels personally insulted – insulted enough to spend 15 minutes of airtime ranting and raving about how he doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment and sponsors should drop the Passion and they must hate gays and dont allow gay people into their stadium and…blah, blah blah…
OH SHUT THE HELL UP YOU HYPOCRITICAL MORON!!!
The only thing I feel sorry about Mark Madden for is that he can’t stop shoving crappy, unhealthy food into his mouth and get off his lazy, palid butt long enough to do something healthy for his body before it quits on him for good. It’s no wonder he only speaks highly of women who take their clothes off for a living, since he couldn’t get a decently intelligent woman to put up with his arrogant, sexist drivel for more than the few minutes it takes her to chug the beer he pressured her into accepting.
Maybe Mark Madden should spend less time being offended by random twitter remarks and spend more time learning why his own public, on-air, racist, sexist, and homophobic comments, which he and Clear Channel broadcastedto an entire city, are offensive to other people.
Have you ever felt rage? I am not talking about the temporary ire we all occasionally feel when an office mate is won’t return repeated calls or when some other driver veers dangerously close to a car that we only owe three payments on. I mean an enduring tempest the likes of which is sustained only by the unending onslaught of bigotry and ignorance that plagues our existence. Have you ever felt that?
Sometimes, I am amazed and enraged at the things some people consider acceptable human behavior. For instance, today, Liberty Council released a sickening internet meme that compared homosexual people to drug addicts. Liberty Council compared people loving each other to people with a self-inflicted disease. Liberty Council labeled genuine love of another person, “unhealthy relationships” Their insistance that the “deep hunger” (read, the general need for love that most humans feel!) homosexuals feel can only be sated by an intimate, personal relationship with a meat sack that may or may not have even existed and (if he did exist) died nearly two millennia ago notwithstanding, I find Liberty Council’s opinions about gay and lesbian people highly offensive. And this comes just a day after reading this sectarian diatribe from a walking douchebag over at LifeSite pseudo-News. (I won’t link there directly so as not to boost their misogynist egos.)
The rage is hard to portray with polite words; but I imagine it would go something like this:
Dear enormous jerk,
Thank you for bathing me in your horrendously unkind words and spreading your hateful lack of wisdom over me and my people. I appreciate your genuine enthusiasm. But I and my colored, slant-eyed, Semitic, handicapped, heretical, retarded, lesbo, faggot family would be unabatedly happy on the occasion that you dropped dead so that we and the rest of our human family could get on with our short lives in un-accosted bliss.
I am appalled. The day after Gabrielle Douglas became the first Black woman EVER to win the Olympic individual all-around gymnastics competition, I see rumors that NBC released an “apology” for following up her glorious moment by airing a commercial with a monkey in it. A monkey.
Seriously? What is WRONG with people?!!!
NBC never should have apologized for airing that commercial, no matter WHO was on just before it. What NBC SHOULD have apologized for is all the racist jerks who associated a fracking monkey in a TV commercial with a Black athlete in the first place! Only a racist bigot would make such an association. The fact that some racist people put their bigoted spin on a random coincidence and then backed a spokesperson into a corner for a forced apology doesn’t make NBC wrong. It makes the racist bigots who thought it up in the first place wrong.
I was watching that segment. I watched Gabby Douglas win the gold medal in absolute superb style. I watched Bob Costas discuss her historic victory. I watched the ensuing commercial for NBC’s upcoming TV show “Animal Practice.”
And guess what!
I didn’t think anything remiss about it. I thought the commercial was dumb the first time I watched it. I thought it was dumb the umpteenth time I watched it that night. I thought about how Bob Costas looked older and wondered how long has he been hosting the Olympics. I thought about how proud I was of Gabby Douglas becoming the first woman of color to win a gold medal in the Olympic Women’s all-around gymnastics competition. I thought about a lot of things. But not one time did I associate the cute little monkey in that dumb commercial with the fantastically talented gymnastics genius I had just seen on screen. Do you want to know why?
In terms of racial inequality and prejudice, his country is messed up. But it is a much better place to live than most countries on Earth. I lived in Russia studying abroad for a summer and have first-hand experience in how racist other people in other countries can be. FIFA-sponsored soccer tournaments are a prime example of the state of race relations (or lack thereof) in the rest of the world. The campaign for every tournament lately is something countering racism. For the FIFA World Cup 2014 (TM) the slogan is ALL IN ONE RHYTHM (TM) – spreading the idea that soccer is a socio-cultural phenomenon and a unifying force, and the unity and diversity of Brazil. In 2006 it was “A time to make friends.” Racism in Europe is a big problem.
But we got Theirry Henry out of it. So it’s a mixed bag.
I wish that philosophy of unity and diversity filled my office. I recently had an infuriating episode with a coworker. We were discussing why he felt the need to put an unnecessary, redundant note on a drawing for a foreign customer. I tried to explain to him why the note was unnecessary by getting him to reason through the customer’s actions. His response to me was, “Because I just assume they’re ignorant.”
He just assume’s the customer is ignorant.
He just assumes they’re ignorant.
I instantly got so mad, I loudly replied, “Well that is a completely inappropriate idea,” and stormed out of his office.
Would he have made such an offensive comment if the customer was not foreign? Personally, I don’t think he would have. Even if his comment wasn’t based on the ancestry of our clients, it was an entirely inappropriate, offensive thing to say about ANY customer and reflected an attitude of someone who won’t do his or her best to represent our company favorably.
Just because you don’t say racist things and you have Black friends doesn’t make you progressive or colorblind or tolerant or whatever you want to call yourself.
When you are a minority living in a city that is over 98 percent white, you notice. People are surprised when I tell them I have a graduate level college degree. Once, at the end of a conversation on racially-motivated hate, a girl told me never walk home by myself. I get those people who try overly hard to tell me how colorblind they are or how cool they are with Black people. And to top it all off, the theater by my house didn’t bother to show Red Tails! I mean, why would anyone around here want to watch a movie about Black history? (Sigh.)
Because of my innate novelty here, I have found myself questioning whether I really want to bring my children up in a place where they also would be an instant stand-out. The other night, a disgusting scene broke out in my favorite bar – a liberal enclave in this rural, right-wing county. Some guy whose girl was apparently seeing a new beau on the side, caught his lady friend having dinner with another bar patron who happened to be Black. I remember seeing him take a picture with his phone. But I didn’t think anything of it. That is until he confronted both of them. (The new guy, totally unsuspecting, was quite surprised of this man’s existence.) The man pointed straight at my (now) new friend and told him twice he was a “fucking nigger.” Twice. Pointing at his face. (That shit don’t fly in my favorite bar – he was promptly banned.)
Ya know, I don’t care if he was mad about finding his girlfriend with this other man. I don’t care if it was just something he said in the heat of the moment. The fact that he said it means he thinks it. The fact that he thinks it means he is a racist. I don’t want my children growing up in a place where they will be treated or even considered differently by people like him.
Just because you don’t say racist things and you have Black friends doesn’t make you progressive or colorblind or tolerant or whatever you want to call yourself. What you say matters. What you do matters. How you treat people matters. But most of all, what you think is what matters.
Did you know that there is no specific antonym for the words bigot or racist? Do you want to know why? Because such a thing doesn’t truly exist yet.
Makode Linde’s stated purpose for this work was to bring attention to the torture of female genital mutilation. In my opinion, he accomplished that quite well.
Makode Linde "Painful Cake"
Art is a peculiar thing. It is nearly always is created to portray a message, a message that is most times suspended in a fog of interpretation. And most people just don’t get it.
Enter Jezebel. The popular, pop-centric feminist blog released an article today criticizing a Swedish Official, Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth, who participated in a performance to raise awareness about female genital mutilation in Africa. At the event, a moving piece of performance art by Makode Aj Linde featured a Venus of Willendorf shaped cake, dressed in black icing and African jewelry, headed by the artist in blackface screaming in agony with every slice of Venus’ nethers – in relevant fashion, the cutting starts at her most intimate parts.
Jezebel (following suit with several media outlets), rather than attempting to explain or understand the history and issues being brought to light by the artist, chose to jump on the “OH EM GEE THAT SWEDISH OFFICIAL SHOULD APOLOGIZE” racism shout out bandwagon – complete with baseless reproach.
“Many Swedes are incredibly uncomfortable with photos from the event, where it appears that Liljeroth is not troubled at all by her role in the performance art, smiling, laughing, and drinking. And the crowd pictured laughing all around her sure looks like it’s full of assholes, too.”
Of course Swedes are uncomfortable with the photos – they are meant to be! Linde is throwing their racism right in their faces, after all. Oh, and way to go with the respect for others, ladies (not).
Makode Linde is know for his provocative artwork meant to bring attention to Swedish attitudes toward Black people. His art brims with symbolism. This installation was no exception. Makode Linde’s stated purpose for this work was to bring attention to the torture of female genital mutilation. In my opinion, he accomplished that quite well. I personally found the performance very disturbing; and probably would have had considerable trouble cutting into that cake.
Blackface has historically been used to dehumanize Black people. Linde’s purposeful use of blackface in his “Painful Cake” is meant to call out society for this dehumanization and show that Black women are real human beings. Blackface represents Swedish society’s view of Black women as simplistic caricatures of Black humanity rather than the real pillars of the family that they are. His performance proves his point with exemplary efficiency – no one seemed horrified by what they were seeing, at least not during the portion of the performance released on tape.
Black women suffer life-long pain from female genital mutilation. African baby-goddesses are being held down by their own mothers while their genitals are ceremoniously sliced off and sewn back up and they are then tied up for weeks to ‘heal’ badly while society is busy having cake.
Maybe if we scream loud enough, people will realize these girls are real.
Nuclear Grrl - Atomic Feminist 