Tag: Events of the Day

Sports columnist Jason Whitlock is often an interesting commentator on race issues, particularly as they relate to sports. Here’s an excerpt from his column today:

The people at the top of the rap music food chain should not be afforded such easy forgiveness. They know exactly what they’re doing. They know the dishonesty and the illogic that fuels the popular sentiment within commercial rap music industry that states the embrace of the N-word is harmless because young people have redefined it and erased its dehumanizing power.

This popular mantra is every bit as intellectually dishonest as the mantra that slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, lynching and discrimination are issues that no longer affect modern American society.

Jay-Z and the other denigration rappers and comedians love to say they’ve taken the N-word from bigots and transformed it into a word of affection and respect. It’s a lie.

The N-word was given to/slapped on black people in America 300 years ago to justify our mistreatment. It was given to define us as less than human so that mentally slave owners would have no trouble treating us as animals.

You don’t change something built to destroy you into something that uplifts you. It’s the equivalent of thinking the slop/food fed to slaves can be transformed into raw fruits and vegetables. As bad as our diet is today (and it’s a direct descendant of what we were forced to eat 300 years ago), actually what we’re trying to do with the N-word is much worse.

The N-word is human feces. It’s not meant for consumption. Jay-Z and his defenders can sauté human waste in butter and garlic for a month and it’s still gonna taste like $**t and lead to poor health.

As long as we keep cooking and serving up the N-word to each other, we’re going to remain mentally comfortable hunting and executing each other like animals and throwing on baseball caps supporting the killers.

Regardless of the user, the N-word is still doing the exact job it was intended to do in the 1700s. Hell, it’s doing a better job.

I honestly can’t claim enough familiarity with race issues to know how I feel about this. On the one hand, the attempted taking-over of the N-word and its concurrent attempted transformation into a tool of irony is a fascinating cultural development. On the other, I’m not sure it’s a good thing.

In fact, as a white male, I’m not sure I even can ever gain sufficient familiarity with race issues to have a genuine feeling about this, other than a vague sense that something is deeply wrong, that racism is still alive and well, albeit mostly bubbling beneath the surface. Trouble with that is, lots of things do even more damage when they’re bubbling beneath the surface, because that allows us to get complacent and think, oftentimes, that it’s not there at all.

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We expect our legal system to produce moral consequences, and yet, so often it does not. It’s probably the case that a codified legal system can’t be expected to always produce moral consequences, precisely because what’s moral cannot be so precisely codified. But this does not excuse a lack of efforts to try to make it better, and it certainly does not lessen the pain that arises when the moral and the legal so spectacularly fail to intersect.

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(A repost of what I’ve run on July 4 the last couple of years)

Here’s a really weird story. It’s so weird, I’m not sure the historians didn’t make it up out of whole cloth. It seems that around 235 years ago or so, some folks living in a place under the rule of a King decided that they didn’t much like the way that King was ruling them. At all. They pretty much decided, en masse, that their King was behaving, to use a current term, like a douche.

Now, over the many centuries before these folks came along, lots of other folks in other lands have decided that their Kings and Queens were being douchey, so they came up with ways to replace them. They’d organize revolts, usually behind the banner of some obscure relative of the monarch’s so they could say that their person has a better claim to the throne, and off they’d go. So you’d expect that the folks we’re talking about here would have just said, “You know what? Our King is a douche. Let’s replace him with a new King.”

But these folks didn’t say that. What they said was, “Not only does our King suck, but he sucks so much that we’re now thinking maybe we won’t even have any more Kings. We’ll do it all ourselves.”

Over a year or so, there were some battles and skirmishes between these folks and the troops sent by the King to put down the pesky rebels, but it didn’t work, and that notion — “No more Kings and Queens!” — took hold. It became a really popular idea, so finally, these folks appointed some representatives to gather in one of their cities and talk these issues over. The conversation went like this:

GUY #1: So, we’re all agreed then? Kings suck?

GUY #2: Yes, Verily, they suck.

GUY #1: OK, so what do we do?

GUY #3: Well, we’re already fighting, so we just keep fighting. But we should probably tell the King that we’re being serious and we’re not just a bunch of rabble-rousers here.

GUY #1: Right! How do we do that?

GUY #4: How ’bout a letter? I’ve got some nice parchment, quills, and a new bottle of ink.

GUY #2: Good idea! But you’re about as eloquent as my cow. You’ll just write “Hey King, sod off” and be done with it. We should be a bit more poetic about it.

GUY #4: How about Tom? He’s pretty poetic.

GUY #1: Good idea! Let Tom do it. Now where’s that Adams guy with the beer?

So a guy named Tom wrote the King a sternly-worded letter. It was pretty wordy, given the standards of the time, so here’s a paraphrase:

Dear King,

We the undersigned, being representatives of the people of your colonies, have collectively decided that you are a douche and we don’t want to live under your rule anymore. Furthermore, we’re going to come up with a government of our own that won’t even have a King. Now, we’ve just called you a douche, so you’re probably thinking that we should be kind enough to at least tell you all the reasons we have for thinking you’re a douche, so there’s a list of those reasons later on. For now, suffice it to say that we believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. And you don’t. And since we like the whole Life and Liberty thing a lot more than we like you, we’re gonna take those and let you do whatever it is you do with your time in that Palace of yours.

So, here’s the list of ways you’ve pissed us off. Note how long it is. You don’t have to be a douche, you know.

…

See? Really, dude. There’s no reason for some of that stuff, right? So anyway, have a good life and all. You’ve still got your island, and Canada seems pretty happy with you for some reason (but really, they’re weird folks to begin with, what with that odd game they like to play on ice). But we’re out of here.

Signed,
All the guys present

PS: Could you make sure your soldiers always wear those bright red coats? It makes it really easy to see ’em in the forests. KTHXBAI.

And so it came to pass that after some years of war, and some further years of cruddy government, they all got together again and figured out how they wanted to set up their new, “No Kings!” government. Their notion was to spread power out amongst a bunch of folks who were accountable to the people, and to further make sure that their government was required to respect certain rights that couldn’t be taken away. It was a really weird idea…and yet, these folks worked hard to make it work, and their children kept working hard to make it work, and their children kept at it, and so on and so on and son on, until today.

Does it still work? Sometimes yes, sometimes not so much. But we’re still here, and we’re still working at it.

So Happy Birthday, United States of America! You’re a wonderful, weird, beautiful, maddening, and awesome country.

(Hey! Uncle George is in there!)

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I’m trying to wrap my head around this story. A convicted murderer is about to go free in Indiana. The case has never been in doubt; this isn’t a case of innocence-by-DNA. The woman confessed to the crime, and there has never been any challenge to her conviction. The sentence, however, was: the woman was sentenced to death. But she was only 16 at the time.

Murderers are…well, they’re murderers, and I struggle with my notion of how best to deal with them. I honestly do believe in rehabilitation and maybe even redemption, and this woman has served 27 years in prison. Is she rehabilitated? I guess that’s not really for me to say. It’s a tough question. But the idea of sentencing someone to die for a crime — and this one, involving a butcher knife and more than 30 stab wounds, is pretty heinous — before they’re old enough to have even most of the privileges our society reserves for ‘adults’ seems extreme.

And then I read further in the article and I learn that until 1988, you could be sentenced to death in Indiana as young as ten years old.

Many years ago, I believed in the death penalty. It seemed pretty clear to me: murderers should be executed. Eye for an eye, and all that. But I changed my mind when Ted Bundy was executed.

If you were to draw up a list of every murderer in the history of the human species, and rank them in order of who most deserved the death penalty, I think there’s a pretty good chance that Ted Bundy would wind up in the top ten. He is among the very worst things our species has ever produced. But I’ve never forgotten the news footage of his execution, during which a raucous and celebratory crowd was gathered outside the prison, brandishing hand-painted signs that said things like “Barbecue Ted” and “Fry Bundy Fry”. Those images were like a bucket of cold water, thrown upon me. The state was killing a human being, and there were folks outside the place where it was happening. And they were having a tailgate party.

I haven’t had much confidence in the moral underpinnings of the death penalty since then.

In my lifetime, at least one state maintained the legal authority to execute ten-year-old children. The mind reels.

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Kevin Drum:

My generation got a cheap college education when we were young, and we’re getting good retirement benefits now that we’re old. Pretty nice. But now we’re turning around and telling today’s 20-somethings that they should pay through the nose for college, keep paying taxes for our retirements, and oh by the way, when it comes time for you to retire your benefits are going to have to be cut. So sorry. And all this despite the fact that the country is richer than it was 50 years ago.

But at least today’s kids don’t have to worry about being drafted. That’s something, I suppose.

Look, just what kind of country do we want to be, anyway? This stuff didn’t happen out of the blue, and it’s not an unforeseen consequence that nobody could have known might happen. This is the fruit of our choices.

So again: what kind of country do we want to be?

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I just don’t have the mental capacity to process the awesomeness of this.

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A good article by Bruce Schneier:

As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it’d be easy to be scared. It’d be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something — anything — to keep us safe.

It’d be easy, but it’d be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators’ hands — and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don’t have to be scared, and we’re not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there’s one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

It’s hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people — far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random — in this case involving an innocent child — senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact.

But our brains are fooling us. Even though this will be in the news for weeks, we should recognize this for what it is: a rare event. That’s the very definition of news: something that is unusual — in this case, something that almost never happens.

Remember after 9/11 when people predicted we’d see these sorts of attacks every few months? That never happened, and it wasn’t because the TSA confiscated knives and snow globes at airports. Give the FBI credit for rolling up terrorist networks and interdicting terrorist funding, but we also exaggerated the threat. We get our ideas about how easy it is to blow things up from television and the movies. It turns out that terrorism is much harder than most people think. It’s hard to find willing terrorists, it’s hard to put a plot together, it’s hard to get materials, and it’s hard to execute a workable plan. As a collective group, terrorists are dumb, and they make dumb mistakes; criminal masterminds are another myth from movies and comic books.

Meantime, stop reading the news. It doesn’t help.

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