race issues depressing

My only consolation is this.

For a couple of decades, American racism was swept under the rug in terms of the mainstream discourse. It has been pretty bad all along, but mainstream Americans were lulled into thinking that the problem had been dealt with.

In the last few years, largely I think as a response to President Obama’s election, racism has come out into the open. People are beginning to see what minority populations have known all along, that racism is alive and well. It is, has been, and always will be horrific. But at least now it isn’t hiding out.

I also think racism is losing its grip on younger generations. I hope. I do think that it will fade as deeply commited racists of our generation and older fade away.

I hope.

What do you think? Do you see less racism in the youngsters you teach?

Or am I just being Jake Barnes saying to Lady Brett, “Isn’t it be pretty to think so”?

Zooey wrote:

I am just more depressed than ever.

I read a lot of the comments under the various articles on the Rams’ “Don’t shoot” and on stories of Derrick Rose and some Cavaliers wearing “I can’t breathe” shirts.

And the tenor of the comments is just depressing. A bunch of (obviously) white guys proving they don’t get it. At all.

It’s not that I didn’t expect those reactions. It’s just the sheer preponderance of them.

Well the upside iz,
the talking-monkeys will probably
destroy the biosphere before too long
and Gaia can start over. Maybe, with
talking moss, or talking grapes
or something less virulent.

Nice to see Lebron being the anti-Jordan, btw.
I saw a thing on espn’s Outside The Lines.

Go Rams,
w
v

Unrest Over Race Is Testing Obama’s Legacy

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and MICHAEL D. SHEAR
DEC. 8, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/us/politics/unrest-over-race-is-testing-obamas-legacy-.html?_r=0

WASHINGTON — As crowds of people staged “die-ins” across the country last week to protest the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police officers, young African-American activists were in the Oval Office lodging grievances with President Obama.

He of all people — the first black president of the United States — was in a position to testify to the sense of injustice that African-Americans feel in dealing with the police every day, the activists told him. During the unrest that began with a teenager’s shooting in Ferguson, Mo., they hoped for a strong response. Why was he holding back?

Mr. Obama told the group that change is “hard and incremental,” a participant said, while reminding them that he had once been mistaken for a waiter and parking valet. When they said their voices were not being heard, Mr. Obama replied, “You are sitting in the Oval Office, talking to the president of the United States.”

For Rasheen Aldridge Jr., 20, a community organizer from St. Louis who attended the meeting, it was not enough. “It hurt that he didn’t seem to want to go out there and acknowledge that he understands our pain,” Mr. Aldridge said in an interview. “It would be a great mark on his presidential legacy if he would come out and touch an issue that everyone is scared to touch.”

But Mr. Obama has not been the kind of champion for racial justice that many African-Americans say this moment demands. In the days since grand juries in Missouri and Staten Island decided not to bring charges against white police officers who had killed unarmed black men, the president has not stood behind the protesters or linked arms with civil rights leaders. Although those closest to Mr. Obama insist that he feels a new urgency to capitalize on the attention to racial divisions, few dispute that he is personally conflicted and constrained by the position he holds.

“We are really on a precipice of either going in the right direction or entrenching a very perilous racial divide in this country, so I think he’s trying to harness that and tread very carefully,” said Janai Nelson, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. “This is a phenomenal opportunity for him to create a lasting legacy in an area that has plagued African-Americans in particular for decades.”

For his six years in the White House, aides say, Mr. Obama has been hyperconscious that he is the president of everyone and has sought to avoid defining himself or his agenda on the basis of race. Although he did address the 2012 shooting death of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in personal terms, Mr. Obama rose to national prominence with a 2004 Democratic National Convention speech in which he cast himself as the product of a broad American experience, a place where “there is not a black America and a white America.”

The son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya has struggled with questions about his own racial identity — described in his book “Dreams From My Father” — but Mr. Obama is by nature cool and cerebral and rarely shows emotion in public.

Yet in an interview with Black Entertainment Television that aired Monday night, Mr. Obama suggested that critics who say he has not been sufficiently outspoken in response to the deaths in Ferguson and Staten Island have their facts wrong or are expecting something he cannot deliver as president.

“I’m being pretty explicit about my concern, and being pretty explicit about the fact that this is a systemic problem, that black folks and Latinos and others are not just making this up,” Mr. Obama said, referring to his response to the killings in Ferguson and on Staten Island, where Eric Garner, 43, died after a police officer restrained him with a chokehold. People may be frustrated that he has not taken sides in the cases, Mr. Obama said, but “that I cannot do, institutionally.” He hinted that in private, his reactions have been stronger.

“I’ll leave it to people to speculate on what I’m saying to myself or Michelle when we’re alone at night,” the president said.

White House advisers say addressing the nation’s racial conflicts is now an imperative for the president’s final years in office. “What’s different about right now is that the president of the United States is committing that he intends to make progress on this issue,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, said in an interview last week. “We have an opportunity now, with the American people — not just in Ferguson or in New York, but across the country.”

Mr. Obama has stepped up some of his rhetoric. In a huddle with Ms. Jarrett and Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. in the Oval Office last month, the president ripped up the beginning of a speech he was about to give on immigration and added a pledge to advocates for change that “your president will be right there with you.”

His administration has also pushed for sentencing guidelines that are more fair to African-Americans, reached out to young black men with the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative and created a task force to address tensions between black Americans and law enforcement agents. A number of civil rights leaders, however, say the president has not done enough.

“People appreciate the fact that he heightened the public awareness of this by making statements and making sure that the attorney general has been present,” said Tanya Clay House, the director of public policy for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. But, she said, “there’s a desire to push the administration further.”

At this point, Mr. Obama’s response to Ferguson, Staten Island and the unrest across the country has diminished his image with important groups, according to new polling figures. Half the respondents in a Pew Research Center survey conducted Wednesday to Sunday disapproved of the president’s handling of race relations, compared with 40 percent who approved — a reversal from August, when 48 percent approved and 42 percent disapproved. While the majority of African-Americans still said the president had handled race relations well, support among them had dropped 16 points since polling in the summer.

For now, civil rights leaders continue to lobby Ms. Jarrett and other White House aides to pressure the president into seizing on the post-Ferguson anger. But Mr. Obama is limited in how directly he can engage. He sent representatives to the funeral of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old shot in Ferguson, and the youth’s parents said they thought it was better for Mr. Obama not to pay his respects in person rather than risk creating more chaos.

In Ms. Jarrett’s view, Mr. Brown’s death has unleashed a new energy among Americans on an issue that Mr. Obama is ready to embrace. During the Oval Office meeting last week, she said, the president urged the young activists to accept incremental steps even as they fight for more sweeping change.

“Shoot for the sky,” Ms. Jarrett said he had told them, “but ‘better’ is good.”

Because of an editing error, an article on Tuesday about President Obama’s addressing the country’s racial conflicts omitted part of a quotation, and in so doing altered the context. In quoting the president, Valerie Jarrett, one of his senior advisers, said that he told young activists in a meeting last week to “shoot for the sky,” adding, “but ‘better’ is good.” He did not say only “Shoot for the sky.” The article also paraphrased incorrectly from Ms. Jarrett’s comment about the protests surrounding the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. She said his death has unleashed a new energy among Americans, not among African-Americans.

Wow.

from Dad’s Conversations About Race: ‘Most White Kids Don’t Get This Talk’

Calvin Hennick

https://www.yahoo.com/parenting/dads-conversations-about-race-most-white-kids-104952792887.html

Race doesn’t exist for my kids yet. To my 3-year-old son, I’m “blue” or “gray” or “yellow,” depending on the color of my shirt. And my 5-month-old daughter is primarily concerned with whether or not I’m holding something shiny.

Soon, though, they’ll notice that Mommy has dark brown skin, that Daddy’s skin is sort of pink, and that theirs is somewhere in between. Eventually, they’ll figure out that these differences actually seem pretty important – that people who look like Mommy and Daddy tend to live in different neighborhoods from each other, tend to attend different schools, and are often portrayed differently in the media.

And they will have questions.

I have no idea what I’m going to say to my kids about race (or sex, or bullying, or any other number of complicated topics that haven’t come up yet). So I set out to talk to parents of older black and biracial kids, as well as a couple of experts, to get some tips.

…

The ‘Police Talk’ Is Real, and It’s Awful

Every parent of black and biracial kids I spoke with has talked to their kids about what to do if they’re stopped by police. My brother is a cop, and I don’t want to make my kids think that police officers are out to get them. But in the wake of the Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice incidents (among others), many parents view “the talk” as a necessity.

Sandy told her son to do whatever he’s told by police officers “and we’ll worry about justice later.”

“After years of saying you need to stand up for what’s right, it’s heartbreaking to tell your child, it doesn’t matter what’s right, you need to lie down,” she says.

One of Sandy’s friends Askia says she’s told her black son to raise his hands as high in the air as possible if confronted by a police officer. “He was looking at me so sad, like, you’re telling me to surrender. I said, ‘If you put your hands up or put your hands behind your back, they can never say you tried to shoot him.’”

STORY: Texting Acronyms Parents Need to Know

Adrienne, another of Sandy’s friends, tells her 10-year-old son not to act in fear when he sees a police officer, but gives these tips: “Move very, very slowly. Always be respectful. Say ‘yes sir.’”

Now, these might sound like decent guidelines for anyone to follow. But most white kids don’t get this talk. I know I didn’t. And I’m not looking forward to having it with my son.

There’s No Way Around the Tough Stuff

One thing I worry about is making my kids paranoid, so that they’re constantly on the lookout for racism. But again, the parents I talked to said that, for them, their kids’ safety trumps everything else.

After Trayvon Martin was killed, Askia wouldn’t let her son wear hoods for a period. “As sweet as his smile is, they’ll never see it in the rain, in the dark, with a hood on,” she says. “They’re going to see him as a six-foot-tall black man. They’re not going to see him as a baby.”

STORY: Being a Foster Dad Breaks My Heart, and Makes It Whole

Sandy stopped her oldest son from playing hide-and-seek with friends in the neighborhood at night. “I had to explain to him, that even though you’re a child playing a child’s game, you’re man-sized, you’re black, and you can’t run around with your hoodie on in the dark, because people might think you’re a criminal.”

It’s Important to Emphasize the Positive

When I watch the news (or worse, read comments on the Internet), it’s easy to feel like practically everyone in the world sees black kids as a threat. But that’s not true, and it’s not what I want them to think.

“I’m always reminding my kids that good exists, and if they talk to their black father or their black grandparents, they’ll hear how much better things are than they were,” Sandy says. “I want my kids to feel that the world is good and that people are good. So I do tend to focus on progress.”

“When my kid can see that the president is a brown guy,” says Gary, a friend of Sandy’s who is black and has a biracial son, “he should know there’s nothing anyone can say to him to make him feel less-than because of his skin color.”

All of This Might Change

Gary’s father suffered a detached retina at the hands of a white Alabama police officer, and he grew up seeing people hand out Ku Klux Klan fliers. But his son isn’t exposed to any of that.

“Years ago, when I talked to him about the Civil Rights Movement and slavery, he asked, ‘Why would people treat other people like that?’” Gary says. “His question was, ‘What are you talking about? How is that possible?’”

Eventually, I hope my kids (or their kids) will be able to look back at the things happening today – racial gaps in wealth and education levels, largely segregated housing and schools, etc. – and ask the same questions.

Rush Limbaugh says, Idris Elba can’t be James Bond, Bond isn’t black.

Idris Elba says, if it happens, I do not want to be called the “black James Bond.”

Idris Elba

Mackeyser wrote:

I wouldn’t call him the black James Bond.

I’d call him a good or bad James Bond based on how well he played the role.

James Bond wasn’t fucking BLOND, either, btw… remember all the uproar over THAT?

Well, after Skyfall, which is arguably the best Bond movie, EVER… not many are arguing about Daniel Craig as a legitimate Bond.

If Idris Elba knocks it out of the park, it won’t matter.

But… the minute Idris Elba kisses a white woman, some folks will lose their shit…

And frankly, I have dark thoughts about those people…

I remember getting into a discussion of Idris Elba playing Heimdell in Thor.

A couple of guys were saying the Norse gods were not black. They were white. So this is an insult.

There were a lot of things I coulda said, and didn’t. What I did say was “well they didn’t speak English either, you know, so….”

True story.

I watched Pacific Rim only because Elba has such presence.

https://www.popularresistance.org/breaking-ferguson-protesters-occupy-slpd-headquarters/
…twenty-five people in Ferguson, Missouri,are occupying the St. Louis Police headquarters. In the meantime, SLPD are busy chasing around a diversion march on the streets….