Meg Tapucol-Provo

Why President Obama Tiptoes Around Race

2012-01-26T20:22:00.000-08:00

I was in the car tonight, driving to pick my son up from Tae Kwon Do. I almost exclusively listen to talk radio in the car, and tonight was no exception. I turned to KOMO News Radio and was listening to an excerpt of an interview of Barack Obama by Diane Sawyer.

Somehow the conversation turned to the issue of the GOP debates. Sawyer asked President Obama if he felt that the candidates were saying things to gin up racial resentment. I found it interesting, but not surprising, that President Obama avoided talking about race. He didn't answer the question in racial terms, but rather redirected the answer and said that it would be up to the voters to decide what type of President they wanted. Sawyer kept asking the President the same race-related question in different ways, and in fact even said, "Don't want to go there, huh?" And he didn't go there. Ever.

Because President Obama doesn't benefit from white privilege as other presidents did, he cannot talk about race without being accused of playing the race card. While former President Clinton often talked openly and honestly about racial issues, and was often referred to as the first "black" president because he was very in tune with the African-American community, President Obama has had to essentially pretend that race is never an issue in any circumstance in order to appease white voters. President Clinton, because he benefited from white privilege, was able to talk about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking. When he declared there was a racial issue at hand--in fact, when any white person declares there is a racial issue at hand, their race lends them more credibility for that position than a person of color will have. ("White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" by Peggy McIntosh, 1988). Tim Wise says it best in this essay from March 6, 2008:

"More importantly, to the extent Obama’s success has been largely contingent on his studious avoidance of the issue of race–such that he rarely ever mentions discrimination and certainly not in front of white audiences–one has to wonder just how seriously we should take the notion that racism is a thing of the past, at least as supposedly evidenced by his ability to attract white votes? To the extent those whites are rewarding him in large measure for not talking about race, and to the extent they would abandon him in droves were he to begin talking much about racism–for he would be seen at that point as playing the race card, or appealing to “special interests” and suffer the consequences–we should view Obama’s success, given what has been required to make it possible, as confirmation of the ongoing salience of race in American life. Were race really something we had moved beyond, whites would be open to hearing a candidate share factual information about housing discrimination, racial profiling, or race-based inequities in health care. But we don’t want to be reminded of those things. We prefer to ignore them, and many are glad that Obama has downplayed them too, whether by choice, or necessity."

Thoughts on the First Day of my Ninth Year Teaching EDUC240

2011-06-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

For nine years now, I have been teaching EDUC240 at Green River Community College, "Multiculturalism and Anti-Bias Issues in Education". When I first started teaching this class it was geared towards preservice Early Childhood Education teachers. We discussed diversity in the framework of an Early Childhood Classroom. Over the years, I redesigned the course to accommodate preservice K-12 teachers--about half the students now are those who already have their Bachelors Degree and are taking the course as a prerequisite to the Masters in Teaching Program at the University of Washington and other universities.

Over the course of these nine years, I have seen some major changes in attitudes. I think these attitudes reflect some of the attitudes in our society. In general, I think that the students coming into the class have been more savvy about diversity-related issues which has made the conversations much more deep and meaningful.

In 2003, when I first started teaching the course, no one had heard of white privilege. I think possibly that may have been due to the fact that most people only hear about the concept of white privilege in academic environments, and most of my students in the early years were coming from owning their own daycares or coming from high school. Because of this lack of knowledge, and because of the nature of white privilege, most white people are oblivious to their own privilege and therefore deny its existence, this was a very difficult subject because of all of the resistance. Once we opened up the class to those who had already been to college, many had heard of white privilege in a sociology class. This made the discussions about it much easier, as there were many people aware of its existence and able to share concrete examples of it from their own lives. Also, having white allies in the classroom who confirmed the existence of white privilege, rather than having just me (a person of color) claiming the existence of white privilege went a long way in bolstering the argument (which just goes to show how white privilege works). Another helpful tool was the addition of the video, "White Privilege 101" in which dozens of people, whites and people of color, talk about what white privilege is and give concrete examples of how it manifests itself in their lives. This year, anti-racist activist Tim Wise came to University of Washington Tacoma to speak about white privilege and he is a white male who speaks eloquently and powerfully about white privilege from a white male's point of view. He is quite aware that because of his privilege, as white AND male, people listen to him about the concept of white privilege. He has said that when people of color can fill rooms and will be listened to when talking about white privilege, maybe then we will have arrived. That time has not yet come though. So until that day comes, I have my students watch YouTube videos of Tim Wise.

The other area in which I saw a change in attitude was sexual orientation. I actually first co-taught the class in 1996 with the director of the Early Childhood Education department. I remember talking about issues around sexual orientation and the pushback we got. Most of it was from those who were opposed to bringing up anything around sexual orientation because of their own religious beliefs. Now when we talk about sexual orientation issues, most people are quite aware that there are many LGBT people with children and that they deserve to be treated with the same dignity and respect as any other parent. There is also much awareness of the tragic situations around anti-gay bullying and the resultant suicides that have happened. I believe that people have become much more intolerant of homophobia in the school environment. It's not that homophobia doesn't exist, I just think that someone who is outwardly homophobic now is going to be persona non grata in an educational environment, so it is not something I am seeing among my students.

Anyway, I love teaching this class. What I particularly love is when I see students of mine who I run into a year later who tell me that they were so inspired by the class that they changed their major. One of my students who really struggled initially with the content of the class ran into me at the latest Diversity Conference. She is now majoring in Early Childhood Education with a focus on Diversity Issues! She is committed to Social Justice and recently had some racist images taken off of the wall at a school in Auburn! Woohoo! This is why I love doing what I do!

"Ghetto" is not an adjective

2011-06-15T21:56:00.000-07:00

One of the projects I assign my students in my Multiculturalism and Anti-Bias Issues in Education Class is to research articles on diversity issues in education and compile them in a Resource File that they can refer to later in their careers as educators. One of my students found this article and shared it with me. I found it very interesting because over and over again, I've heard subtle (and not so subtle) comments about the different schools in the Federal Way School District, and most recently, the school we are sending our child to.

The article my student sent me was written by a woman in Kent whose daughter chose to go to Kent-Meridian High School because of the International Baccalaureate program there. The mother admitted to having trepidation because she had limited experience with people of color and heard that it was "scary". Some would not send their children there because of the way it "looked". Yet once the mother went to the school, she had a completely different attitude, and is thankful that her daughter has experienced being with such a diverse student body. She feels that her daughter is more prepared for the reality of a more diverse society and she found that the school is very respectful in the way that people treat each other, not the place of horror stories that everyone assumed it was.

Just recently, someone questioned why we were sending our son to Federal Way High School, calling it a "ghetto" school. It is amazing to me that this person said this, given the fact that of all the Federal Way high schools, it is ranked the highest on Newsweek's list of top high schools in the United States. Yes, it has a high number of students on free and reduced lunch and a high number of students of color. But it also has the only center for the Cambridge Academy on the West Coast, a highly rigorous curriculum developed by Cambridge University. It has the highest percentage of students taking advanced classes. Do people assume a school is "ghetto" just because of the high number of black and brown students? Do people not realize the ramifications of using that word?

People who commit to anti-racist behavior realize that if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. If you think the world is a better place without racism, then do your part and stop using racially loaded words like "ghetto" as an adjective. And if you think this is just about being politically correct, well if not using racist language is being politically correct, then I guess I'm guilty. I'd rather be politically correct than a bigot.

Finally - Light at the End of the Tunnel!

2010-02-22T11:10:00.000-08:00

So it looks like President Obama has come up with his own proposal of a health care reform bill. It also looks like the Senate is headed towards using reconciliation to avoid a filibuster. About time! How the Democrats could hold the majority in the Senate and allow the Republicans to hold them hostage on health care was disgusting.

The Republicans' nickname as the "Party of No" is well-deserved. They clearly have no desire to support anything that Obama proposes, or that will be perceived as a victory for the Democratic party. Where this is the most apparent is when Republican Senators co-sponsor bills, then when it comes time to vote for those same bills, they vote against them. It absolutely boggles the mind.

So now, President Obama has come up with his own proposal of a health care reform bill and has asked the GOP for their input (just like the GOP has said--they want to have input). Yet John Boehner has already called the wahhhhhhmmmbulance, complaining that the bill is a combination of the current House and Senate bills which are primarily Democratic and doesn't have any GOP ideas in it (not true). The whole point is Obama has reached out and asked for GOP input, yet all Boehner wants to do is whine.

One more thing--WHEN health care reform passes, the GOP will bitch and moan and say that the Democrats will have ignored the American people. But the fact of the matter is, every poll that has been conducted on health care reform says that the vast majority of people WANT health care reform and AREN'T happy with the current health care system and skyrocketing insurance costs. Republicans torpedoed Clinton's attempts at health care reforms, then did NOTHING for 15 years, and now they are trying to torpedo Obama's attempt at health care reform too.

My prediction is that health care reform will pass and the Republicans will again be seen as the party who voted against what's best for the American people. History repeating itself.

Four Years Later - Where Are We Now?

2009-10-01T09:09:00.000-07:00

I started this blog in September of 2005 in response to the tragedy in New Orleans. The botched response to Hurricane Katrina exposed the racial divide in our country in the most extreme of circumstances. I felt so many emotions around what I was witnessing and I couldn't keep them bottled up or I would have exploded. So I started a blog to express what I felt was the playing out of privilege, oppression, institutionalized racism and classism--all in front of our eyes at the New Orleans Convention Center day after day in the aftermath of the hurricane.

I have facilitated workshops for the Anti-Defamation League and I teach a college class called "Multiculturalism and Anti-Bias Issues in Education". This is something I do for a living, so these issues permeate my thoughts on a daily basis. The events of the last few months have me very concerned. Where is our country headed, that someone can post a poll on Facebook that asks if President Obama should be killed? I'm absolutely appalled that our society has come to this.

I believe that Jimmy Carter was right in his assessment--some of this vitriol comes from the fact that there are those that absolutely cannot accept the fact that our President is African-American. There are those who will argue that it is about Obama's policies. There may be some who truly are only against his policies. But I truly believe that there are those who even subconsciously may feel uncomfortable with the idea of an African-American president. Those who say, "I don't see color," yet by their actions it is very apparent that they, in fact, are prejudiced.

For example, take a look at the demographics of the 9/12 rally in Washington, D.C. 99% of the people attending that rally were white. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it was not a place that people of color were likely to attend. Particularly when there were signs showing Obama as a witch doctor as well as other signs that were overtly racist.

Everywhere you turn, there has been an attempt to marginalize and make Obama appear as an "other". During the election, there were attempts to paint him as a Muslim by highlighting his middle name. Not only was this untrue, but it was offensive to Muslim-Americans because it suggested that there was something wrong with being Muslim. There was an attempt by Fox News to make an innocent fist bump between President Obama and his wife into some sort of sinister "terrorist fist jab"--again an attempt to paint them as "dangerous". Finally even John McCain realized how out of control it was getting, when at a rally a woman called Obama an "Arab" and McCain had to defend him, although while doing so, he inadvertently offended Arab-Americans.

On Election Night, my husband Tom and I celebrated like the rest of the country. I had never seen people SO happy! I had volunteered all day in my hometown of Des Moines, Washington and at the end of the day we went to downtown Seattle to celebrate at the Westin with the governor and the other elected officials at the big Democratic Election Night party there. On the way in, people were out in the streets drumming, dancing, screaming, yelling--everyone was so ecstatic! Our kids also had watched it on TV and called us up, screaming and yelling, "OBAMA WON! OBAMA WON!" It was so unbelievable. I remember being at the Westin when Clinton won and we were happy, but it was not anything like this!

But there are some Republicans that just will not accept Obama as President and are doing everything to delegitimize him. The birther movement has already been debunked yet attorney/dentist/real estate agent (you've gotta be kidding me) Orly Taitz continues on her quest to prove that President Obama was born in Kenya and therefore his presidency is not valid. And the pathetic thing about it is you have certain right-wing congresspeople willing to support the birther movement. What happens is the low-information voters who are unable to think critically buy into this crap and then a movement is perpetuated.

Nancy Pelosi made a speech about the danger that is fomented by this hateful rhetoric. I completely agree. And it's not necessarily the loudmouths that you see at the town halls or 9/12 rallies. All this hatefulness that is being spewed by Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs and all the other right-wing conspiracy theorists is fodder for those loners (think Tim McVeigh and the Unabomber) who have absolutely no morals or boundaries. This has got to stop. If there is someone who has the audacity to put up a Facebook poll asking if Obama should be killed, who knows what kind of other nutcase is out there?

When the White House is asked if they feel it is a racial issue, Obama cannot say, "Yes, I believe it is about race." Why? Because as an African-American, he will be accused of playing the race card. Whenever a person of color says that race is an issue in any particular incident, he/she will ALWAYS be accused of playing the race card. Therefore, Obama HAS TO say that race is not an issue. What has to happen is that other people, particularly, white people, need to make that observation. And other people HAVE made that observation. In fact, many people have.

What is ironic is that for people in the dominant culture, if you do not live in a racialized world where race is not part of your day-to-day existence, you can never know how that might impact your life. So what happens is that in any given situation, it's difficult for you to empathize how race might be a factor in that situation, because it is never a factor for YOU. So when a person of color expresses how race might be a factor in a life situation for them, someone from the dominant culture automatically DENIES that as a possibility and says they are "playing the race card" when in fact they are just sharing their life experience as a person of color.

It's the same as if a person has a disability. If a person is disabled and shares a difficulty they have in their life because of their disability, do you automatically say they are "playing the disability card". Probably not, right? So why do people always bring up this race card thing? I think it's because people of the dominant culture do not want to talk about race. They want to pretend that race is not an issue.

Funny, I have NEVER heard a person of color say, "Oh, you're playing the race card." Never ever. Because when I talk to my friends of color, whether they're black, Asian or Latino, when we talk about how our race might be a factor in a situation, there's always an understanding that yes, that is a possibility. We can all empathize with that.

In our society people of the dominant culture really are socialized not to talk about race. They're fascinated by it, but don't want to talk about it at the same time. The class I teach is great because I teach students who are planning to become teachers. We talk about all kinds of differences--race, gender, class, disabilities, sexual orientation. Are they uncomfortable at the beginning? You betcha. And for the most part, almost every class I teach I am the only person of color. Most of my classes are all white. But I provide a safe environment where people can say whatever they want to say without feeling judged.

I'll give you an example. Every quarter, there is someone who inadvertently uses the term "colored person". Rather than act shocked that the person used the term, we talk about the history of the term, how that term was used back in the 1950's to refer to African-Americans during the Jim Crow era in the South, and how it really harkens back to an ugly time in American history. I also draw the distinction between the term "colored person" and "person of color" because some people are confused by that.

And by the end of the class, the students come away with a completely new way of looking at the world. They are able to see the world with their eyes wide open and that the media perpetuates a lot of stereotypes. They are able to see the world through different perspectives and realize that their perspective of the world is not the only one. And they are able to talk about race without fear and in a more objective manner.

Implementing an Anti-Bias Curriculum

2009-06-16T14:38:00.000-07:00

Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes. Each year when I teach my class, Multiculturalism and Anti-bias in Education, my students, all of whom are studying to become teachers, go beyond the borders of their comfort zones and try to empathize with what it is like to walk in the shoes of someone different. The vast majority of my students are white, female and middle-class. Yet the children they will be teaching are increasingly diverse. The vast majority of my students view the world through a cultural lens that may be very different than the ones that their future students may be viewing the world through. It is so important that my students have the ability to empathize with other world viewpoints, and to see that other cultural perspectives are just as viable. It is important that they do not view people of color as foreign, or exotic, but as normalized. Through the class, we talk about infusing anti-bias curriculum into the day-to-day curriculum, so that it just becomes the norm, rather than "Tacos on Tuesday", or what we call a "tourist curriculum".

I'm Still on a High!

2008-11-12T08:41:00.000-08:00

It has been eight days since Barack Obama was elected POTUS and I'm still beaming from ear to ear! I feel like the country has come out from an eight year hibernation in a cave and it's a new day in America!

On Election Night, Tom and I first went to Mick Kelley's Irish Pub in Burien where a contingent of people from the 33rd and 11th Legislative Districts watched the Election Night speeches on the big screen. John McCain gave a very gracious concession speech and I believe him when he says he will support Obama. When Obama gave his victory speech, Tom and I sobbed. We both grew up during the Civil Rights era. One of the first corporations I worked for after I graduated from college was under a consent decree because of systemic discrimination against women and people of color, and for years proactively hired women and people of color under court order. However, this didn't stop the discrimination that happened once women and people of color were hired. I ended up filing an EEO complaint against the company for gender discrimination and won a promotion and back pay. I consistently saw white men of mediocre talent get promoted over women and people of color of greater ability. When I filed my EEO complaint, women and people of color who rightfully should have been promoted finally got the promotions and pay increases they deserved. At the time, I was 26 years old. Another friend of mine filed a sexual harassment complaint; she too won her complaint as there was concrete evidence of the harassment. But there were many people who were discriminated against who felt powerless, who felt that if they stood up against those in power, that they might lose their jobs. So they put up with the discrimination.

That experience in a sense informed my decision to become a diversity trainer. I have always been interested in issues of social justice. I can remember as early as fifth grade reading books about civil rights and being moved by these stories. I decided rather than sit on the sidelines and bemoan the situation, I wanted to do something about. Originally I became an actor in a diversity theatre company, performing plays about institutionalized racism and facilitating discussions afterwards. Great experience. Afterwards, I worked with several diversity consulting firms and facilitated workshops in corporations throughout the country about workplace diversity. I've also worked with the Anti-Defamation League, working with schools on prejudice reduction and with Green River Community College as an adjunct instructor, teaching Multiculturalism and Anti-Bias in Education.

When I think back to the struggle of women and people of color in our society, and now look at how far we've come, with Hillary Clinton as a viable candidate and Barack Obama as our president-elect, I feel that the battles that many of us have waged have been worth it. The younger generation does not view race in the same way that older people view it, and I believe a lot of that is due to education, and how educators really are taught to not bring their biases into the classroom. There is a strong focus on anti-bias education, and has been for a long time now. And it was that all-important youth vote that was critical in Obama's victory.

I read a great article today. It talked about how Fox News is really helping the Democratic party. By preaching their hate, anti-Muslim rhetoric, and anti-intellectual rants, they push away moderates from the Republican party to the Democratic party so that the only ones left are the hard right, low education voters. Yea, Fox, keep on doing what you're doing! Here's the article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/11/AR2008111102257.html

Sarah Palin Does Not Value Diversity

2008-09-15T12:12:00.001-07:00

One thing that really struck me when watching the two political conventions was that the Democratic Convention was very inclusive. You had young and old, all different ethnicities, people with disabilities. Forty-four percent of the delegates were people of color. What a great representation of our country!

As I watched the Republican Convention, I really had to search the crowd to find a person of color. I also had to search the crowd to find someone under 55. Seriously. It looked like a senior citizen's convention. A white senior citizen's convention.

I remember one Republican pundit saying that they don't have quotas and that's why the Democratic Convention has more people of color. Well, I was part of the caucuses here in Washington State, and we do have goals in order to be more inclusive but guess what? We met most of our goals during the regular caucuses. Meaning, during the Congressional District Caucuses, when the national delegates were elected, we voted for a diverse delegation. Diverse in terms of age, race, sexual orientation, gender and disability status. You see, Democrats are inclusive! We don't limit our delegates to a select group of European-American, upper-middle-class 60-year-olds.

So what does this have to do with Sarah Palin? Apparently, she has absolutely no relationship with the African-American community in Alaska and has not returned any phone calls from one of the African-American leaders in Alaska. She doesn't feel it's important. Check out these two blogs:

http://freerangewriting.blogspot.com/2008/09/palin-and-divesity-representation.html

http://electronicvillage.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarah-palin-and-african-americans-in.html

Clearly, we can see where she stands in terms of her relationship with people of color.

The Politics of Spin

2008-09-14T10:14:00.000-07:00

This morning I was watching "Meet the Press", as I do every Sunday morning at 6:00 AM. Boy, the Republicans sure know how to spin an answer.

Rudy Giuliani was being interviewed by Tom Brokaw, and Brokaw was hitting him with some pretty tough questions. First of all, he showed a clip of McCain promising to run a respectful campaign, followed by a recent attack ad in which the McCain campaign states that Obama's only accomplishment in education is providing sex education to kindergarteners! Which is not only patently false (Obama did not sponsor the bill, and the bill is about teaching K-12 children how to avoid sexual predators), Giuliani goes on to blame Obama for McCain's negative ads, saying that McCain wouldn't have to do negative ads if Obama had agreed to town hall meetings!

Then he defends his sarcastic and condescending remark about community organizing in his RNC speech. He turned it around by saying he was referring to how little a record Obama had in community organizing. Sorry Rudy, we all heard what you said. That is NOT what you said. You sneered. You said, "Community organizing". Then you laughed and said, "Yeah," in a mocking tone. It had nothing to do with his record. You were just being an asshole. Then he went on and on about him being the most liberal senator, blah, blah, blah.

When asked about the "bubba" vote, and the impact of those who may not be emotionally prepared to vote for a black man, he answered it very superficially, saying he knows John McCain and he knows that John McCain doesn't want people to vote for him because of race. I call BS on that comment too, because so many ads from the McCain campaign subtly and not-so-subtly paint a picture of the Obamas as "other", trying to appeal to those racist voters who are not comfortable voting for an African-American. And then there are the conservative groups and scurrilous emails that have perpetuated rumors about the Obamas--that portray Michelle Obama as the "angry black woman" or Barack Obama as a Muslim, or an innocent fist bump as a "terrorist fist jab", or the rantings of their pastor as somehow reflective of their views. What I don't understand is why isn't the media looping the story about Todd Palin's ties to a secessionist party? Why isn't the media airing the story about Sarah Palin's pastor saying that any critic of George W. Bush and his policies will burn in hell? Why is there a double standard when it comes to coverage on Republican candidates and Democratic candidates? Liberal bias, my a**! The media is owned by corporations.

We deserve to know about Sarah Palin. This sequestering of Sarah Palin is ludicrous. It should be clear to EVERYONE by now that she does not know anything about foreign policy. She is being hidden from the press because she is not able to answer questions on the fly and the McCain campaign is terrified that she is going to make a fool of herself. She already made a fool of herself in the Charlie Gibson interview when she had no idea what the Bush Doctrine was. Some people may argue, "Well, so what, not everyone knows what the Bush Doctrine is." Yes, but SHE is running for Vice-President. SHE should know what it is. Clearly that was not one of the things she was PREPPED on. The Vice-Presidential job is not something ygu study for like a test. You need to be prepared, and clearly she knows NOTHING about foreign policy in a time when we are engaged in not one but TWO wars! She says her foreign policy experience is about ENERGY! Give me a break! And then Giuliani tries to defend that position by skirting the issue and saying that it's about her executive experience? What, her part-time position as mayor of a podunk town of 6,000 people and governor of Alaska for less than two years, where she is under investigation for abuse of power? Come on, do you really think we're that stupid?

Please use your vote wisely. This election is way too important to waste it. The McCain/Palin ticket is not about change. The choice of Palin was a calculated move to bring evangelical Christians to the ticket and hopefully women; however, many women realize that Palin does not share their views when it comes to women's reproductive rights. Obama and Biden have a record of supporting women's rights.

This election really matters. It really matters. We can do this.

Register to vote! Educate yourself!

2008-09-13T20:37:00.000-07:00

This election REALLY MATTERS this year. If you are not registered to vote, you can do so easily online at the following website:

http://www.voteforchange.com/index_obama.php?source=091008emailR#

It will take you less than three minutes and you'll even be able to register to vote absentee. I vote absentee because I don't have to worry about how to get to the polls, I get my voters pamphlet early, and I have time to peruse it and decide how I'm going to vote at my leisure before Election Day.

Also, it is VERY important to inform yourself. Watch the news. Read as much as you can. Educate yourself. Don't believe scurrilous rumors. Don't vote for someone because they seem like they'd be nice to have a beer with. Vote for someone smarter than you. Vote for someone who truly understands the issues. Vote for someone who you feel truly has your best interests in mind.

The culture wars reignited

2008-09-06T06:46:00.000-07:00

What has become clear from the Republican National Convention is that John McCain used his surrogates to reignite the culture wars. Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin went on the attack and viciously tore into Senator Obama, throwing out the "red meat" for the party faithful in St. Paul to dig their fangs in. They were sarcastic and condescending. Mean.

Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin invoked the term "community organizing" with utter disdain--indeed, Giuliani laughed and repeated it to the crowd as if to say, "Yeah, can you believe it, community organizing." Do they care that the civil rights movement was the ultimate community organizing? Or the women's movement? Or women's suffrage? Or the American Red Cross? Or the United Way? And it takes RESPONSIBILITY? Oh yeah, it's not that they don't care, THEY JUST DON'T GET IT.

Mitt Romney went on stage and kept on drawing contrasts between LIBERAL values and CONSERVATIVE values and how we need to return to CONSERVATIVE values, and blah blah blah. Mitt, Mitt, Mitt. It is YOUR Conservative party and Conservative values that got us into this mess that we're in now by voting for Bush not ONCE but TWICE. TWICE! UNBELIEVABLE! They voted for someone with conservative values and who they were comfortable having a beer with--and he's now the butt of jokes and disrespected by international leaders. People are sick and tired of the right wing evangelicals hijacking and dividing this country by taking their extremist stands on social issues and forcing them on the rest of us. Not this time Mitt, not this time.

And Sarah Palin. The fact that she came out of nowhere, and after ONE speech, the Republicans say, "She is one of us!" Yet Barack Obama has been giving speeches for 20 months, gave probably one of the most historic speeches on race in the history of our country, and people are STILL saying, "We still don't know him." Yeah, right.

John Ridley wrote a great blog about the glaring double standards that exist in these campaigns that I have to share. You'll get a kick out of them:

The Guide to the Conservative Palinguage Vol. 2 - The People's Edition
John Ridley

This is the Vol. 2 of The Guide to the Conservative Palinguage. I'm calling this one the People's Edition because you, the people, have obviously been taking AP courses in talking Conservative. I've been slammed with responses. Enough that I can promise you there will be future volumes. Along with some of mine, I've mixed in a few of yours for everybody's linguistic pleasure.

Before we start, I'd like to note that I intimated in Vol. 1 that English is a Latin based language. Hondorf was among a few others who pointed out that English is "primarily German based, yes, but it is really a hybrid of Germanic and Romantic languages . . . by the way, I am a redneck."

Clearly, none of us should judge a neck by its color.

A reminder, we're collecting Palinisms here, and over at That Minority Thing.com. If you've got 'em, send 'em.

Ready? Let's begin!

If you get 18 million people to vote for you in a national presidential primary, you're a "phoney." Get 100,000+ people to vote you governor of the 47th most populous state in the Union, you're "well loved."

SoyAA says: If you are biracial and born in a state not connected to the lower 48, America needs darn near 2 years and 3 major speeches to "get to know you." If you're white and from a state not connected to the lower 48, America needs 36 minutes and 38 seconds worth of an acceptance speech to know you're "one of us."

If you give your wife a dap on stage, it's actually a "terrorist fist jab." If your daughter licks her palm so that she can slick down your youngest child's hair on national TV it's an "adorable moment." (Seriously, forget about abstinence only, teach these folks some grooming skills).

DTD SAYS: If your pastor rails against inequality in the United States of America, you're an "extremist." If your pastor welcomes a sermon by a member of Jews for Jesus who preaches that the killing of Jews by terrorists is a lesson to Jews that they must convert to Christianity, you're a "fundamentalist."

If you're a black man and you use a scholarship to get into college, then work your way up to being the president of the Harvard Law Review, you're "uppity." If you're a conservative and your parents pay your way to Hawaii Pacific University . . . you only have four more schools to attend over the next five years before you somehow manage to graduate (it might be five more schools over the next five years. No one has yet verified whether or not Palin was actually ever registered at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. But, you know how shady people are who ever attended any kind of school in Hawaii).

SeanOcali says: If you're 18, white, and get a 16 year old girl pregnant "life happens." If you're 18, black, and impregnate a 16 year old girl, you're a "registered sex offender."

If you spend 18 months building a campaign around the theme of "Change," it's just "empty rhetoric." If one week before your party's national convention you SUDDENLY make your candidacy about "Change," that's "red meat."

And your last lesson for the day:

If you are a Democrat, an Independent, or even a moderate Republican, if you're female, male, white, black, Asian, Hispanic, bi-racial, multi-ethnic, or GLBT, if you're a Jew, Gentile, Muslim, agnostic or atheist -- "Yes, we can!"

If you're a pitbull with lipstick from Alaska, "Yup, yup!"

Sarah Palin amateur hour

2008-09-05T13:11:00.000-07:00

I just finished watching a video on MSNBC of Sarah Palin giving a speech in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. She did not have the luxury of a teleprompter while giving her speech. This woman was not only READING her speech, but she was using her finger to follow where she was on the page!!!! WTF? And this is what we want from a Vice-President? If she is so ready, shouldn't she just be able to speak about why she feels John McCain is the best man for the job? I don't recall Joe Biden looking at notes when he was introduced in Springfield. When I saw Senator Obama in Seattle, he spoke for at least an hour at Key Arena and he had NO NOTES. If she is being handed a piece of paper to read, hell, any news reporter could do that! I've done a ton of voice over and acting work--I could do that! Anyone who can read without making a mistake and make it sound halfway decent (which is more than I can say for John McCain) can do that! But Sarah, please, please don't use your finger to keep your place on the page! It looks so, so very elementary school!

It's clear why the McCain campaign isn't allowing Palin to go in front of the press by herself. They are deathly afraid she will say something wrong, not be able to answer questions, make a fool of herself. They know that she knows nothing about foreign policy. They know she is not ready. They are playing games and they know it. The only people who love her are the right-wing evangelicals. Even the mainstream Republicans think she is the biggest risk in political history.

Obama Arrogant? No, McCain is the Arrogant One

2008-07-31T06:57:00.000-07:00

The media narrative now is that Obama is "arrogant" and "presumptuous". He is being compared by the McCain campaign to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton--as a mere celebrity, shallow with nothing of substance inside.

Of course, many of us see the barely veiled meaning in these code words...Obama does not know his place. How dare he go to Berlin and speak as if were president! Who does he think he is? Who is this uppity young black man? HOW DARE HE?!?!

I decided to share one of the best articles I've read about this whole phenomenon. It's by Paul Jenkins and it really lays out what I believe has been going on for the past 18 months--first of all in the primaries and now in the general election in terms of the way Senator Obama has been treated and also how he has been perceived.

Obama Still Does Not Know His Place
Paul Jenkins

When Barack Obama started running for president, he was widely described as arrogant for daring to take on the Clintons after just two years in the Senate, despite the fact that polling at the time showed him to be the only threat to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

Eighteen-months later, we are told by the McCain campaign and its traditional media parrots that Obama is at risk of looking "presumptuous" for his recent trip abroad, even as he has registered a small but significant bounce in the polls upon his return, presumably for doing what most of us expect of a presidential candidate.

The man who slayed Democratic royalty, who has raised more money than any political campaign in US history, drawn record-breaking crowds in the US and abroad, who has been ahead of John McCain since widespread general election polling began four months ago, this man is presumptuous for thinking he has a good shot at becoming president and should therefore get to know his potential counterparts and visit the sites of US military activity?

Most candidates Obama's age will be charged sooner or later with youthful conceit for taking on their elders, no matter how guilty those elders are of mismanaging the country. It happened to some extent to Bill Clinton, and surely to others before him. However, it is hard not to see in the ongoing attitude towards this presidential frontrunner, just three months before the election, something more uncomfortable that is not simply a matter of age, but one of race.

Throughout the primary there was a growing sense of disbelief in the Clinton camp that this young'un (older than Bill was in 1991 when he started running, mind you) really thought he had a shot at this. Bill, in particular, showed little patience for Obama's "fairy tale" campaign, eventually going ballistic because, in his own version of "some of my best friends are," he did not understand that even he, whose office is in Harlem, may be condescending towards African-Americans, and towards this African-American in particular. Perhaps more perniciously, some long-time African-American political and business leaders joined in with some of the worst stereotyping of the campaign, seemingly upset at the upstart who dared to go where most of them had not.

Now McCain is recycling some version of this superciliousness, heavily aided by a traditional media still so easily scared into thinking it is not tough enough on Obama. McCain can hardly hide his rage at this uppity kid who thinks he can hobnob with world leaders just as he does -- who thinks he has more judgment than a septuagenerian war-mongering former prisoner of war. And who sees no reason to wait his turn when barely 1 in 10 Americans think the country is on the right track, thanks to his elders' enlightened leadership. In a weird echo of the Clinton attacks, McCain smirks his way through one sarcastic comment after another, his face twisted in hatred and disbelief. Not only is Obama "presumptuous," he also "doesn't understand." It is never clear what Obama doesn't understand since he actually has not gotten his facts or, so far, his analysis wrong, as opposed to McCain whose errors in fact and in judgment are so numerous as to make one wonder where he has been for the past 20 years (poring over Cold War era reports on Czechoslovakia? Hanging out at the Iraq-Pakistan border? Plotting to bomb-bomb-bomb bomb-bomb Iran?). McCain is the most arrogant of Senators (not a light charge), yet even by his standards the tone he adopts towards Obama is so densely patronizing that here too it is hard to dismiss it as purely a matter of age gap. McCain's joke of an economic advisor, Carly Fiorina, is now also laying it on thick: she is glad that Obama is consulting with experts. This from the woman who nearly ran a Fortune 100 company into the ground and whose candidate knows so little about economic issues after three decades in Congress that Fiorina is reduced to repeating that McCain "has been understanding [economic issues] for months."

That Obama is actually able to listen to facts, absorb them and analyze them should be a good thing. We assume that those skills came in handy throughout his life, not least at Harvard, where he graduated near top of his law school class. This, of course, now makes him an elitist, as he would not be expected by the old DC guard to possess any such competence (charisma perhaps, analytical ability no.) Both McCain (894th out of 899 at Annapolis) and George W. Bush revel in their under-achieving school days, as if this made these scions of hyper-privilege any closer to real people. This tactic clearly succeeded well enough for Bush to be elected president twice, and McCain to be nominated once. But there is a sense that American voters may not be taken in again and that they may actually enjoy as president someone who isn't an inbred moron or a senile fratboy.

Obama's partner in elitism, his wife Michelle, is in extreme tongue-biting mode. This is a shame, but it is inevitable, as she too is under the kind of scrutiny that would make Cindy McCain's face melt back into some approximation of reality. It is widely understood that Obama is more deserving of close examination than McCain because she is more actively involved in her husband's campaign than Cindy is. This of course is a lie: McCain has campaigned extensively for her husband and, were it not for her family fortune and her private jet, he wouldn't even have come close to being nominated. The truth is that Obama is expected to play a certain role: strong, angry, overbearing, and every one of her statements is demeaningly parsed in that light. If every word uttered by McCain were analyzed and reported to fit the stereotype of the rich, spoilt, husband-stealing white woman that she is, all would be fair. But instead, we get adoring glances, little examination of her actual role and an occasional hiccup about Michelle Obama's lack of patriotism.

What angers John McCain and bemuses many traditional observers is how unflappable Barack Obama remains in public, no matter how condescending the attacks. There is little doubt that the thick skin he grew over decades came in handy as he started to run for president. The past 18 months surely were not the first time Obama was baited for being black, for being white, for being Muslim, or for not being from "here," and it must be fascinating, although not unexpected, for him to see these patronizing attitudes resurface at this stage of his life. For the rest of us, what is fascinating is to witness how these old-school mindsets are backfiring on those who hold them, making them look less wise, more prejudiced, less fit to lead and altogether completely unappealing. And to witness that in America in 2008, it is perhaps not a bad thing not to know your place.

A Tale of Two Campaigns

2008-07-19T07:44:00.000-07:00

If anyone still thinks McCain is the better candidate for president, then they should take a look at the two campaigns, since the way a candidate runs his presidential campaign is a pretty good indicator of how he would run his first term in office. McCain's campaign is in disarray and has been a topic of conversation among his own party members. In fact, it went bankrupt early on. Contrast that with Obama's campaign, which has run smoothly since it was announced, with Obama at the helm and run by David Axelrod and David Plouffe. It has an impressive operation and has raised an unprecedented amount of money, primarily from small donors.

Read more on Daniel Burrell's blog:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-burrell/can-america-afford-a-mcca_b_113591.html

Recent NY Times Poll on Obama and Race

2008-07-16T06:19:00.000-07:00

I just read the NY Times article this morning which talked about Obama and how is candidacy isn't affecting the racial divide between blacks and whites. This doesn't surprise me at all. This divide is deep and has been developing over many generations. It's not something that is going to change overnight with one man's candidacy.

Sometimes I wonder who these pollsters call. When I read at the bottom of the article that the people who were polled were about 1300 white people and 200 black people, I thought to myself, well that's pretty skewed. Also, are these calls just random? And in all those calls, did they not get one Asian person or Hispanic person? As an Asian person, I always feel that these discussions about race always revolve around black and white. In this article, Hispanics were even mentioned as overwhelmingly for Obama. No mention of Asians. Asians voted overwhelmingly for Clinton in California--are they going to stay with Obama or go for McCain?

Included with the article is a graphic illustrating different questions asked of the interviewees about different racial issues. One of the questions is "Do you have a favorable opinion of Barack Obama?" It amazed me that in this poll, only 31% of whites had a favorable opinion and 31% were undecided or had not heard enough! Who were these pollsters interviewing? People who had been under a frickin' rock? They hadn't heard enough? Watch the news! Go on the Internet! Read a magazine! He's on the news everyday! He's been on the news everyday for over a year! I don't really trust these polls because they tend to contact an older population and exclude a younger population whose primary phone is a cell phone. I think if younger people were included in these polls, the results would be much different.

Do Your Research

2008-06-07T10:09:00.000-07:00

It never ceases to amaze me how gullible people are.

I can't tell you how many people I have met who are filled with misinformation about Senator Obama. "He refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance--he even said so in his book!" Yeah, that's what someone said to me over dinner after a soccer tournament last weekend. She told me she had actually read his book "Dreams From my Father" and that he had said he refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Well, you know, I read that book and I don't ever remember him saying that in his book. Ever. I had a discussion with her about this and she was adamant. Then she mentioned some picture where he was standing with his hands at his side and everyone else had their hands over their hearts. Hmmm, sounded like she had received some email to me.

So I did a simple Google search, and of course, up comes a bunch of pages dispelling the rumor. The picture was NOT about the Pledge of Allegiance. It was taken at an event and it was during the National Anthem, and somehow someone spread an email rumor that Obama refused to put his hand over his heart during the Pledge, then that morphed into he refused to SAY the pledge, and it went viral. There was NEVER anything written in his book saying this, and he always puts his hand over his heart when he says the Pledge. And he DOES say the Pledge.

But why are people so willing to believe this garbage? Why don't they just do a Google search? Do they believe every email chain letter about every potential computer virus that comes their way and pass it on everyone in their address book? Are they that stupid? Or do they do their research to see if it's a hoax? And if so, then why not do the same thing when they receive this CRAP about Obama?

I truly think it is because they really want a reason not to vote for him, so if they hear something negative about him, they don't want to know the REAL TRUTH. So they don't bother to research it. They just pass on lies without doing research. Which to me is rather despicable.

I find it interesting that I have never received ONE negative email about Barack Obama. I never received the Muslim one, or the Pledge of Allegiance one. I guess people know better than to send me anything like that because I've been known to speak out when I've received any kind of email that smacks of intolerance. Thank goodness, less spam.

If you support Obama, or even if you're just open to seeing what Obama is about, then please don't just take any of these scurrilous rumors about Obama at face value. Do your research. Go to Google and type in a couple of keywords, like "obama pledge of allegiance" or "obama muslim" or whatever else you're concerned about. You'll find the answer you're looking for.

An Open Letter to Hillary Supporters

2008-06-06T07:55:00.000-07:00

The primary season is now over. Senator Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee. It has been a long 17 months, but Obama has won fair and square. I know that many of you are very, very angry about this. But the fact of the matter is that this is a democracy, and the people have spoken.

Some of you are so angry that you have threatened to write in Hillary Clinton's name in November or to vote for John McCain. This really amazes me. How many of you have been lifelong Democrats? How many of you want our troops out of Iraq? How many of you are pro-choice? How many of you care about social justice? Or about universal health care? You do realize, don't you, that Clinton's stance on the issues are almost identical to Obama's? Is it more important for you to be angry? Or is it more important for you to have a country that starts heading in the right direction? Because with John McCain as president, our country surely will not be heading in the right direction.

John McCain has vowed to overturn Roe v Wade. He wants to keep troops in Iraq for 100 years. He is against universal health care. He is supported by lobbyists. I'm sorry to break the news to you, but your candidate will be coming out this Saturday to endorse Obama, and it's time you jumped on the bandwagon. We need a unified party in order to get the Republicans out of the White House, and your anger is not going to help. In fact, your anger will only hurt the party if you end up voting for McCain.

I was a huge Clinton supporter before Barack Obama came around. I truly think he was just the better candidate. This had nothing to do with sexism--as I would love to have a woman president. But Obama ran a truly spectacular campaign and he was a truly spectacular candidate. And Clinton made many, many mistakes in her campaign. This primary was hers to lose, and she lost it.

I hope you think long and hard and get over your anger before going to the voting booth in November.

"Yes We Can" Bracelets

2008-05-28T19:40:00.000-07:00

I have been so inspired by Barack Obama that I've decided to create these "Yes We Can" bracelets. Each are one of a kind, hand made of glass or wood beads. I'm selling them as a fundraiser. Here is just a small sampling of the bracelets:

I am selling them for $7 each. If you are interested in buying one, please email me at megacious@comcast.net.

A Unified Democratic Party

2008-05-12T09:06:00.001-07:00

As the Democratic Primaries wind down, I am more and more certain that our party will become unified. Senator Clinton has backed off from the negative attacks that have been so divisive for the party. More attention is now being paid to McCain, and his flaws are showing. Our economy is a mess, and gas prices are ridiculous, which portends well for Democrats, since no one wants an extension of Bush's failed economic policy.

Barack Obama has had a consistent message throughout his entire campaign, and was shown to be more honest and trustworthy than Hillary Clinton. This was really illustrated in the holiday gas tax proposal, which both Clinton and McCain pushed. Obama called them out on it, saying it was a gimmick, which it was. And people listened. This showed that people viewed Clinton as a flawed messenger, and were willing to listen to Obama and get beyond the politics of yesterday, where candidates would say anything just to get votes.

I believe that people will come around. The economy is what is affecting most voters in our country today, and John McCain admitted that he didn't know as much about the economy as he should. It was shocking that he would admit something like that, given the fact he's been in the Senate for decades. It's certainly a huge advantage that Obama has over McCain. I believe our economic issues hugely overshadow our national security issues, and even in that arena, most Americans want to get out of Iraq, so McCain isn't exactly on the popular side of that issue either.

Go Obama '08!!!!!!!

Elect Meg Tapucol-Provo National Obama Delegate Congressional District 9!

2008-05-11T22:22:00.000-07:00

Never in a million years would I have thought I'd be running for National Delegate. But I'd like to share with you my story, something I didn't have room to share in the limited space I have on my campaign brochure, which is perhaps how you came to this blog.

Just as Hillary Clinton has claimed Barack Obama to be short on experience in the national political arena, some may say I have not been part of the political process for very long. I have not been. I was only recently inspired to become active politically because of Barack Obama. He inspired me to volunteer for his campaign, and I am now a Precinct Committee Officer. I volunteered at the Legislative District Caucus and plan to volunteer at the 9th Congressional District Caucus. I plan to campaign hard for Senator Obama, attend the State Convention in Spokane, and hopefully go to the Democratic National Convention in Denver. However, like Obama, I am certainly not short on experience. I've been a lifelong Democrat, and strongly believe in the core principles of the Democratic Party, particularly regarding civil rights and social justice. So I've devoted the last 17 years of my life to addressing these issues head on. Indeed, it has been my life's work.

This year marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sadly, our country has a long way to go when it comes to the area of race relations. It's a wonderful thing that we have our first viable African-American candidate. But we all see the ugliness surrounding this election as well, and all of the subtle and not so subtle race-baiting that has taken place to play on people's racial prejudices. It pains me to know that there are still people in this country that will not even listen to Senator Obama's message of hope or his stance on the issues because they only see the color of his skin and have decided they will not vote for him. It's bigotry, plain and simple.

I first started working in the early 90's in the diversity arena as an actor touring with a diversity theatre company called the Growth and Prevention (GAP) Theatre Company. Our group traveled throughout Washington and Oregon and as far as Idaho and Reno, performing musicals about racism and facilitating discussions about race with the audiences afterwards. We performed primarily at schools, but sometimes we performed for non-profit organizations. This was back in the early '90s. It was a great experience. What struck me was that many of the kids we talked to felt as if they themselves were open-minded, but they felt that their parents were not. This was a real source of frustration for them, because they felt as if their parents were unwilling to change their views.

I was inspired by that experience and decided to take it to the next level. In 1993, I began working as a corporate diversity trainer, facilitating workshops throughout the country on diversity-related issues. The difference in corporate diversity training, however, was that the focus was on how diversity and inclusion were good for the bottom line, productivity and morale. Also, the definition of differences tended to be focused on the differences that made a difference at a particular organization (for example, people's accents, their educational levels, the types of jobs they have, etc.) What people discover is regardless of what the difference is, people who feel disenfranchised, marginalized and devalued do not perform at their optimum level. This is difficult work. There were many times that I was the only person of color in the room, sometimes the only woman in the room, and I've experienced the passive aggressive behavior of people sitting in workshops, reading the newspaper or working on their laptops because they don't want to be there, they think talking about diversity is a waste of time. But I keep on doing it, because if someone isn't out there fighting for change, then how do things change? Is everything okay the way it is? Are we happy with the status quo? I'm certainly not.

I also started focusing on diversity within the educational arena. I worked for the Anti-Defamation League A World of Difference Institute where I facilitated prejudice reduction workshops in schools throughout Washington state. In 2003, I joined Green River Community College as an adjunct instructor, where I designed and continue to teach Multiculturalism and Anti-Bias in Education. This is a course for preservice Early Childhood and K-12 teachers that helps them explore diversity in the framework of a classroom. We explore issues of race, class, disability and sexual orientation and how to implement an anti-bias curriculum. This class not only is required for the AA in Early Childhood Education, but is also a prerequisite for the Master's in Teaching Program at the University of Washington. Many of my students have indicated that they felt ALL college students should be required to take this class. Click here for one student's response to my class.

On another note, there was a small detour in the midst of my diversity training career. I really shouldn't call it a small detour, because it was truly life-changing. On December 28, 1998, 45 minutes after the birth of my daughter, I went into cardiac arrest. I had suffered an Amniotic Fluid Embolism, an extremely rare and usually fatal complication of childbirth. Although I was resuscitated after 45 minutes of CPR, I suffered several life-threatening complications, and was in critical condition in a coma and on a ventilator for nine weeks in the Intensive Care Unit at Swedish Medical Center. Thanks to the wonderful care at Swedish, and prayers and support from hundreds of people around the world, I survived, and was released from the hospital after five months and one week. I went through a year-and-a-half of physical, occupational, and speech therapy to relearn how to walk, talk and function, and after five years, returned to work.

During my recovery, I started the Northwest ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome) Support Network for survivors of this horrible disease. I co-chaired the 2nd Annual Conference for ARDS Survivors, Families and Care Providers, in conjunction with the American Lung Association of Washington and Harborview Medical Center for ARDS Survivors and Caregivers. During the outbreak of SARS in 2003, I worked with Mimi Gan of Evening Magazine to help increase awareness of ARDS (which was actually what many SARS patients were ultimately dying of). Click here to view the online Evening Magazine story. I continue to support people who are ARDS survivors, or whose loved ones are in ARDS crisis. I have also volunteered and raised money for the American Lung Association of Washington.

I am the Vice-President of the Woodmont K-8 PTA. I was also the only parent on the Federal Way School District Elementary Design Team, where I fought to ensure that an anti-bias curriculum was implemented in the elementary grades.

I, for one, am angry about the past seven years. When the election was stolen from Al Gore, I really felt hopeless--I was so shocked that something like that could have happened. And then John Kerry lost, to someone who clearly was a lesser candidate, and I thought to myself, what is our country coming to? The last seven years have been a horrible nightmare, but I feel that now we have hope, and that hope is Barack Obama!

My support for Senator Obama is unwavering. I have had conversations with countless people, some of them strangers, trying to convince them he is the right candidate. I've joined mybarackobama.com and Asian-Americans for Obama and made many friends. I've volunteered for the Obama campaign, at the 33rd Legislative District Caucus, and plan to volunteer at the Congressional District Caucus. I've become a Precinct Committee Officer and once Obama is nominated (which appears to be just around the corner), I will be very actively campaigning for him, as well as other local candidates who also support him. Once at the convention, I WILL NOT switch my vote. I am for Obama ALL THE WAY!!!!!!!!

I am on mybarackobama.com, so if you are too, please send me a friend request!

The following people have endorsed me:

Tina Orwall - Chairwoman, 33rd District Democrats, Candidate for 33rd House Seat

Joan Hudyma Tucker - former director of Northwest Center for Equity and Diversity

Kelly Ogilvie - President and CEO of Blue Marble Energy, former Deputy Director of Outreach for Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels

Diana Holz - Director of Early Childhood Education at Green River Community College, Advisory Committee Member on Governor Christine Gregoire's "Washington Learns" Steering Committee

Akemi Matsumoto - Diversity Consultant, Faculty at Bellevue Community College, Seattle-area Social Justice Activist

Melissa Ponder - Seattle-area Civil Rights Activist

Patricia Hunter - Director, Programs and Policy, Alzheimer's Association

My life has been about walking the talk. Having the hard conversations. Talking about issues that people aren't comfortable talking about, because if we never talk about them, nothing changes. If you are a delegate in the 9th Congressional District, please consider casting your vote for me as your representative in Denver!

"We are the ones we've been waiting for." - Hopi prayer

"We must become the change we wish to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi

A great Mother's Day!

2008-05-11T22:08:00.001-07:00

Today I had a great Mother's Day! Tom, Giancarlo and Karina took me out to brunch on the Argosy Cruise ship--it was fabulous! We had a wonderful brunch while we cruised around Elliott Bay. Also, I received two beautiful handmade cards from Karina and Giancarlo, a tissue-paper flower from Giancarlo, a recipe book that Karina made that contained recipes from her third grade class, a cute white stuffed teddy bear that we've named Puffy, and a Canon A590 Digital Camera from Tom! I had actually mentioned I wanted that for my birthday (which isn't until August), but he surprised me and got it for me today! So we had lots of fun playing with it.

I came home and took a nap, got up and watched the "Meet the Press" netcast (I just can't bring myself to get up at 6:00 AM on Sunday mornings!) and then we went out to dinner at Duke's Chowder House at Kent Station. I had the seafood chop chop salad which was really yummy.

A great day!

Senator Obama is one step closer to the nomination!

2008-05-07T15:53:00.000-07:00

After probably the worst couple weeks of Senator Obama's campaign, with the Wright scandal front and center in the headlines, Obama being accused of "elitism" and his loss in Pennsylvania, Senator Obama rebounded with a decisive victory in North Carolina and a performance in Indiana which has virtually ensured his nomination in August.

Senator Clinton needed to win big in Indiana, but only won by two percentage points. It is widely believed that her holiday gas tax proposal, which was opposed by most economists as well as Obama and viewed by him as "pandering" did not help her in either the Indiana or N.C. primary and in fact, may have hurt her.

As usual, the political analysts looked at the exit polls to see how different demographics voted. It is interesting that during this year, race and class have become very important factors in the voting. I cannot recall the analysts talking about "downscale white voters" or the "white working class voters" as much as they do during this election.

I was driving home from the dentist, and I decided to listen to Michael Medved, a conversative radio talk show host, just to see what he had to say about last night's primary results. (It's important to know what your opponents are saying!) Frankly, he disgusted me. He called Obama "dead man walking" and he said that working class whites would NEVER vote for him, that they were Reagan Democrats and they'd all end up voting for McCain in the general election. It sounded like he just KNEW this, and he took it for granted. These are people that were supporters of Hillary Clinton.

If he really feels this is the case, I would really like to know WHY. I know that there is a certain contingent of people who openly admit that they just will not vote for an African-American person, and clearly this is based on racism, pure and simple. I would like to hope that this is a small minority of people. But would there be other reasons why Medved would say working class whites would NEVER vote for Obama? Would they really go against their own best interests and vote for what amounts to a third Bush term? Or is this just right-wing rhetoric? Obama's and Clinton's positions on the issues are much closer to each other's than they are to McCain's when it comes to ecomonic policies, the war, health care, abortion, gay rights, you name it. Clinton herself has said that she would support Obama if he were to be the Democratic nominee. So why would a voter be willing to support Clinton and not Obama, if their own candidate is willing to support Obama? I'd be interested in people's opinions on this.

I think it's important to have these conversations because only then can we come to a greater understanding about people who are different from us. To think that race and class won't be a factor in the general election is to be shortsighted. We've already seen from this primary season that both of these issues have become part and parcel of this campaign season and I have a very strong feeling that in the general election it will get even worse.

Thoughts on being an Obama delegate

2008-04-11T08:39:00.000-07:00

I just received an email this morning from Kyle Forar, who is heading up the Obama campaign for the 33rd Legislative District. I am really fired up and ready to go! Never before have I been so excited about the political process. And I am truly impressed by the young people who are still in high school who are actively engaged in this election! I truly believe that it is Barack Obama who has inspired the historic groundswell of participation in the democratic process that we've seen in this election.

Every day I get onto my computer and I log on to msnbc.com and Huffingtonpost to get my political "fix". Yes, I've become a political junkie. I watch video clips of Hardball and Keith Olbermann online. On Sunday morning, I can't wait until the netcast of "Meet the Press". (I won't wake up at 6:00 AM to watch it on TV--I'm not that addicted.)

To be honest though, I do wish the Democratic primary situation would come to an end soon. Obama is clearly ahead in all indicators--contests won, popular vote, pledged delegates. Every day he is gaining a superdelegate, whereas, Hillary has lost superdelegates. The writing is on the wall. The only thing Hillary is hedging her bets on is that the superdelegates overturn the will of the people, and if that happens, it will be a dark day for the Democratic party. It will show that Hillary cares more about herself than about the good of the party.

I actually used to like Hillary Clinton, but there were so many things that she did during this campaign that were so negative that made me lose respect for her. The lies she told about her trip to Bosnia. When she told "60 Minutes" that Obama wasn't Muslim "as far as she knew". The story she told about the pregnant woman who died, which again wasn't true. The fact that she did not renounce Geraldine Ferraro on the spot after Ferraro made racist comments about Obama. The twisting of the facts about Obama in North Carolina. Her twisting of Obama's stance on abortion in New Hampshire. The 3 AM ad. How she said that McCain was more ready to be commander in chief than Obama, yet implied that Obama might be a good VP (that was weird).

Don't even get me started on McCain. Maybe he isn't as conservative as the right-wing wackos would like, but he has a temper on him that would not serve him well as POTUS. It was recently reported that he went on a profane tirade at his wife when she playfully said to him that his hair was starting to thin. Apparently, his face reddened and, in full view of aides and reporters, he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." Read about it here.

And this is who the Republicans want as their president. Scary, Scary, Scary.

I'm a State Delegate!

2008-04-06T07:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the 33rd Legislative District Caucus for the Democratic Party in Washington State. I arrived early at 9:00 AM to help out (and ended up getting an Obama sign and button because I volunteered--woohoo!). I received a short training on how to register the delegates and alternates, then was assigned to the table for the Burien precincts with a woman named Rose. There was a bit of confusion for a while as to whether to hand out index cards. At first we were told to hand them out, then not to, then they changed their minds again. They told us to hand purple index cards out to Hillary delegates, white index cards out to Obama delegates, and then ultimately, it didn't matter when we got into the gym.

I saw several friends there. I sat with my long time friend Vance Bader, who was a delegate from Des Moines. I also saw my friend and former Seattle neighbor, Carla Jones, who is a real estate agent for John L. Scott, and a delegate from Kent. My friend Chitra Solomonson, a physics professor at Green River Community College and fellow Blue Thunder soccer mom was an alternate from Kent who ended up getting seated as a delegate. And new friends and neighbors, Bill Smith and Stephanie Jurado-Smith, delegates from Des Moines were also there.

When I first arrived, I was not intending to run for state delegate. I had heard that you had to actively campaign and network and shmooze, and I thought to myself, this is just like being a politician. I really didn't want to do that, so I decided against it. But when I got there, so many people encouraged me to do it, particularly Stephanie, and when I saw 100 people get up to sign the sheet to make their speech, I thought, okay, why not?

So I was #37. I went up and talked about my life's work battling racism and bigotry as a diversity trainer and as an educator teaching Multiculturalism and Anti-Bias in Education. Apparently it struck a chord in people because my friend Stephanie, who stayed late to help count ballots, called me and told me I was elected! Stephanie is an alternate! So we are headed to the Congressional District Caucuses now and to the State Convention in Spokane!

The Hurt of One is the Hurt of All

2008-04-04T20:36:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading a post by a former colleague of mine, Patti Digh, who writes an award-winning blog, 37 Days. It's called "Stop doing insignificant work in the world" and it provokes those who are white and straight to ask themselves, would they really want to be treated the way people of color and GLBT people are treated in our society, and if not, what are they going to do about it? Very provocative. Here's the link:

http://37days.typepad.com/37days/2008/02/stop-hate.html

I think this is so appropriate, given the fact that today is the 40th anniversary of the assasination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We have so far to go when it comes to racism and homophobia. Yes, we've come a long way, but we're not there yet.

I cannot tell you how many times I have been to social events, and people use gayness as the punch line. Do people not stop to think that maybe the people sitting in the room have gay friends, or gay siblings?

I've gone to social events where people go on and on about "illegals", as if they're some sort of enemy. Yes, these are parties where I'm the only person of color and I'm not sure if I'm the only progressive there, so I don't say anything. But it's very uncomfortable.

I've gone to parties where the hostess, perhaps not through ill intent but rather through ignorance, made comments like, "I can't believe he tried to Jew me down!" or "We didn't have a Chinaman's chance!" Once I ignored it and felt awful for doing so. Another time I confronted the person who made the offending remark, and the tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

When Patti talks about doing significant work, how many people really make a point of getting to know people who are different than them? How many people read about people who are different than them? How many people confront others when a racist joke is made? Or a homophobic joke? How many people stand up to racism or homophobia? It is difficult to do, because, as one of my diversity workshop participants put it, you're labeled as "that person". But so what? If none of us stands up to racism and homophobia, how will it ever go away?

Take a look at the presidential candidate you're supporting. How do they do in terms of dealing with racism and homophobia? Not so good? Then maybe it's time to switch your support.

Why I Hate Wal-Mart

2008-03-29T21:42:00.000-07:00

I just read a story in today's news that reminded me why I hate Wal-Mart so much. Wal-Mart truly exemplifies corporate greed. How can a company that sells $90 billion in one quarter alone sue an ex-employee for what it paid out to her in health benefits after she suffered irreparable brain damage in a traffic accident?

That's right, you read that correctly. Wal-Mart, the retail giant, successfully sued Debbie Shank, of Jackson, Missouri, who suffered severe brain damage in a traffic accident. Shank was an employee at Wal-Mart stocking shelves. She decided to buy the health and benefits plan. Eight years ago she was in a traffic accident that robbed her of much of her short-term memory, left her in a wheelchair and in a nursing home.

Two years after the accident. Shank and her husband were awarded $1 million from a lawsuit against the trucking company that was involved in the accident. After legal fees, $417,000 was placed in a trust for Shank's long-term care.

However, Wal-Mart turned around and sued Shank and her husband to recoup the $417,000.

Click here to read the details.

Although what Wal-Mart did was not illegal, it is a public relations disaster. This woman has lost her son in Iraq. Her husband divorced her just so she could maximize the amount of Medicaid she could receive. This woman will never have a job again. She has nothing. Wal-Mart has billions. They have a lot of audacity--to them people are nothing but dollar signs. Every decision they make is about the bottom line. They encourage their employees to go on welfare in order to have health benefits. They make people work off the clock. They discriminate against women. They discriminate against people of color. They engage in human rights and labor violations in Third World countries. They put profits before people. It makes me sick.

I know that there are people who love Wal-Mart, presumably because of the low prices. I don't care how low their prices are--I will never shop there because they treat their people like crap. I don't see myself strictly as a consumer, but also as a citizen, and as a responsible citizen, I cannot support a company that essentially abuses its employees.

I completely agree with what Steve Olson wrote on his blog about Wal-Mart. The couple times I have been inside a Wal-Mart I immediately wanted to turn around and walk out. "Wal-Mart's atmosphere is cheap and crass. Target's atmosphere exudes progress and style." Yes, give me Target any day. Stylish products at a great price.

Another Wal-Mart story:

A friend of mine (who is an activist) was having a birthday party at her home and decided to show the movie "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price"--I guess it was just a spur of the moment thing. (By the way, I just found out you can watch the whole movie online here. Anyway, it was a potluck, and there was a couple that had brought a cake from the Wal-Mart Supercenter. Whoops. I guess it was a little uncomfortable.

Hey, I respect people's right to shop wherever they want to shop. And the sad thing is, they do have low prices, and they pay their people so little that I think maybe the only place they CAN shop is Wal-Mart. I just can't stand the place. Everytime I think about it I want to retch.

John McCain's Free Ride

2008-03-22T09:39:00.000-07:00

Why is the media giving John McCain a free ride? During this week alone, John McCain made several gaffes during his trip to the Middle East during which Joe Leibermann had to correct him. He sought an endorsement from a controversial preacher, Reverend Hagee, who has made incendiary remarks about Catholics, gays and women. He compared the Jewish holiday of Purim to Halloween. And a staffer of his was fired for creating an attack video of Barack Obama. Yet where is the 24/7 media outrage? Where are the headlines that we were bombarded with and the pundits weighing in hour after hour, as they were after Rev. Wright's remarks were revealed? If Barack Obama had made this many errors, I guarantee you this would have gotten airplay around the clock.

Dan Abrams of MSNBC pointed out that the media has been playing softball with John McCain and I agree. I think it's patently unfair. If the media is going to investigate every relationship between a candidate and the people they surround them with, they need to do it on both sides. And when a candidate makes a blunder, if they're going to call one candidate out (like FOX News did with Obama's "typical white person" remark, which was taken out of context), then they should be "fair and balanced" and do the same with ALL candidates, which of course they don't.

Obama's History-making Speech

2008-03-18T12:33:00.000-07:00

I was moved beyond words by Barack Obama's speech today. He spoke with honesty and authenticity about the state of race relations in America. He truly has a unique perspective as a biracial man who has lived in virtually every corner of America, and has relatives of every race. He understands the resentments of both black America and white America.

My concern is that will white downscale working-class voters hear his words with open minds? Clearly, Pat Buchanan still couldn't hear the words. While all his colleagues on msnbc GOT IT, he still sounded like a cranky old bigot. And my fear is that there are a lot of cranky old bigots in America.

I just finished reading an article by Tim Wise, who writes a lot about white privilege in America. He actually wrote a lot of things that have been going through my mind. Check it out:

Uh-Obama: Racism, White Voters and the Myth of Color-Blindness
By Tim Wise
March 6, 2008

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write, at least not as soon as I am now compelled to write it: It may well be the case that the United States is on its way to electing a person of color as President. Make no mistake, I realize the way that any number of factors, racism prominently among them, could derail such a thing from coming to fruition. Indeed, results from the Ohio Democratic primary suggest that an awful lot of white folks, especially rural and working-class whites, are still mightily uncomfortable with voting for such a candidate, at least partly because of race: One-fifth of voters in the state said race was important to their decision, and roughly six in ten of these voted for Hillary Clinton, which totals would then represent her approximate margin of victory over Barack Obama.

But having said all that--and I think anyone who is being honest would have to acknowledge this as factual--we are far closer to the election of a person of color in a Presidential race than probably any of us expected. Obama's meteoric rise, from community organizer, to law professor, to Illinois state senator, to the U.S. Senate, and now, possibly, the highest office in the land, is something that could have been foreseen by few if any just a few years ago. Obama's undeniable charisma, savvy political instincts, passion for his work, and ability to connect with young voters (and not a few older ones as well) is the kind of thing you just don't see all that often. The fact that as a black man (or, as some may prefer, a man of biracial background) he has been able to catapult to the position in which he now finds himself makes the accomplishment even more significant. It does indeed mean something.

But this is where things become considerably more complicated; the point at which one is forced to determine what, exactly, his success means (and doesn't mean) when it comes to the state of race, race relations, and racism in the United States. And it is at this point that so-called mainstream commentary has, once again, dropped the ball.

On the one hand, many a voice has suggested that Obama's success signifies something akin to the end of racism in the U.S., if not entirely, then surely as a potent political or social force. After all, if a black man actually stands a better-than-decent shot at becoming President, then how much of a barrier could racism really be? But of course, the success of individual persons of color, while it certainly suggests that overt bigotry has diminished substantially, hardly speaks to the larger social reality faced by millions of others: a subject to which we will return. Just as sexism no doubt remained an issue in Pakistan, even after Benazir Bhutto became Prime Minister in the 1980s and again in the 90s (or in India or Israel after both nations had female Premiers, or in Great Britain after the election of Margaret Thatcher), so too can racism exist in abundance, in spite of the electoral success of one person of color, even one who could be elevated to the highest office in the world's most powerful nation.

More importantly, to the extent Obama's success has been largely contingent on his studious avoidance of the issue of race--such that he rarely ever mentions discrimination and certainly not in front of white audiences--one has to wonder just how seriously we should take the notion that racism is a thing of the past, at least as supposedly evidenced by his ability to attract white votes? To the extent those whites are rewarding him in large measure for not talking about race, and to the extent they would abandon him in droves were he to begin talking much about racism--for he would be seen at that point as playing the race card, or appealing to "special interests" and suffer the consequences--we should view Obama's success, given what has been required to make it possible, as confirmation of the ongoing salience of race in American life. Were race really something we had moved beyond, whites would be open to hearing a candidate share factual information about housing discrimination, racial profiling, or race-based inequities in health care. But we don't want to be reminded of those things. We prefer to ignore them, and many are glad that Obama has downplayed them too, whether by choice, or necessity.

Erasing Race and Making White Folks Happy
The extent to which Obama's white support has been directly related to his downplaying of race issues simply cannot be overstated, as evidenced by the kinds of things many of these supporters openly admit, possessing no sense of apparent irony or misgiving. So, consider the chant offered by his supporters at a recent rally--and frankly, a chant in which whites appeared to be joining with far greater enthusiasm than folks of color--to the effect that "Race Doesn't Matter, Race Doesn't Matter," a concept so utterly absurd, given the way in which race most certainly still matters to the opportunity structure in this country, that one has to almost wretch at the repeated offering of it. Or consider the statements of support put forth by Obama supporters in a November 2007 Wall Street Journal article, to the effect that Obama makes whites "feel good" about ourselves (presumably by not bothering us with all that race talk), and that Obama, by virtue of his race-averse approach has "emancipated" whites to finally vote for a black candidate (because goodness knows we were previously chained and enslaved to a position of rejectionism). Worst of all, consider the words of one white Obama supporter, an ardent political blogger in Nashville, to the effect that what he likes about the Illinois Senator is that he "doesn't come with the baggage of the civil rights movement." Let it suffice to say that when the civil rights movement--one of the greatest struggles for human liberation in the history of our collective species--can be unashamedly equated with Samsonite, with luggage, with something one should avoid as though it were radioactive (and this coming from a self-described liberal), we are at a very dangerous place as a nation, all celebrations of Obama's cross-racial appeal notwithstanding.

What does it say about the nation's political culture--and what does it suggest about the extent to which we have moved "beyond race"--that candidate Obama, though he surely knows it, has been unable to mention the fact that 2006 saw the largest number of race-based housing discrimination complaints on record, and according to government and private studies, there are between two and three million cases of housing discrimination each year against people of color?

What does it say that he has failed to note with any regularity that according to over a hundred studies, health disparities between whites and blacks are due not merely to health care costs and economic differences between the two groups (a subject he does address) but also due to the provision of discriminatory care by providers, even to blacks with upper incomes, and black experiences with racism itself, which are directly related to hypertension and other maladies?

What does it say that Obama apparently can't bring himself to mention, for fear of likely white backlash, that whites are over seventy percent of drug users, but only about ten percent of persons incarcerated for a drug possession offense, while blacks and Latinos combined are about twenty-five percent of users, but comprise roughly ninety percent of persons locked up for a possession offense?

Why no mention of the massive national study by legal scholars Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen, which found that at least a third of all businesses in the nation engage in substantial discrimination against people of color--hiring such folks at rates that are well below their availability in the local and qualified labor pool, and well below the rates at which they are to be found in non-discriminating companies in the same locales and industries? Indeed, according to the Blumrosen study, at least 1.3 million qualified people of color will face job discrimination in a given year. Or what of the study of temporary agencies in California, which found that white women who are less qualified than their black counterparts, are still three times more likely to be favored in a job search? And what are the odds that he'll be likely to mention, to any significant degree, the recent EEOC report, which notes that in 2007 there was a twelve percent jump in race-based discrimination complaints in the workplace relative to the previous year (almost all of which were filed by persons of color): bringing the number of such complaints to their highest level since 1994?

As Obama talks about change and making the "American Dream" real for all, why is he unable to mention the fact--let alone propose specific remedies for it--that thanks to a history of unequal access to property and the inability to accumulate assets on par with whites, young black couples with college degrees and good incomes still start out at a significant disadvantage (around $20,000) relative to their white counterparts? In fact, the wealth gap between whites and blacks--with the average white family now having about eleven times the net worth of the average black family--continues to grow, even as income gaps for similarly educated families with similar background characteristics have shrunk.

And why such muted discussion about the way that, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, government at all levels and across party lines has engaged in ethnic cleansing in New Orleans, failing to provide rental assistance to the mostly black tenant base for over a year, plotting to tear down 5000 perfectly usable units of public housing, failing to restart the city's public health care infrastructure, and even ordering the Red Cross not to provide relief in the first few days after the city flooded in September 2005, so as to force evacuation and empty out the city? While Obama has spoken much about the failures of the Bush Administration during Katrina, openly discussing the deliberate acts of cruelty that go well beyond incompetence, and which amount to the forced depopulation of New Orleans-area blacks, has been something about which he cannot speak for fear of prompting a backlash from whites, most of whom, according to polls, don't think the events of Katrina have any lessons at all to teach us about race in America.

Surely, that Obama is constrained in his ability to focus any real attention on these matters, suggests that whatever his success may say about America and race, one thing it utterly fails to say is that we have conquered the racial demons that have so long bedeviled us. And to the extent he must remain relatively silent about these issues, lest he find his political ascent headed in a decidedly different direction, it is true, however ironic, that his success actually confirms the salience of white power. If, in order to be elected, a man of color has to pander to white folks, in ways that no white politician would ever have to do to people who were black or brown, then white privilege and white power remain operative realities. Obama's ascent to the Presidency, if it happens, will happen only because he managed to convince enough whites that he was different, and not really black, in the way too many whites continue to think of black people, which according to every opinion survey, is not too positively.

Transcending Blackness, Reinforcing White Racism: The Trouble With Exceptions
Obama's rise has owed almost everything to his ability--and this, again, coming from people who support him and are willing to speak candidly--to "transcend" race, which is really a way of saying, his ability to carve out an exception for himself in the minds of whites. But this notion of Obama "transcending race" (by which we really mean transcending his blackness) is a patently offensive and even racist notion in that it serves to reinforce generally negative feelings about blacks as a whole; feelings that the presence of exceptions cannot cancel out, and which they can even serve to reinforce. To the extent Obama has become the Cliff Huxtable of politics--a black man with whom millions of whites can identity and to whom they can relate--he has leapt one hurdle, only to watch his white co-countrymen and women erect a still higher one in the path of the black masses. If whites view Obama as having transcended his blackness, and if this is why we like him so much, we are saying, in effect, that the millions of blacks who haven't transcended theirs will remain a problem. To praise the transcending of blackness, after all, is to imply that blackness is something negative, something from which one who might otherwise qualify for membership ought to seek escape, and quickly.

Note, never has a white politician been confronted with questions about his or her ability to transcend race, or specifically, their whiteness. And this is true, even as many white politicians continue to pull almost all of their support from whites, and have almost no luck at convincing people of color to vote for them. In the Democratic primaries this year, Obama has regularly received about half the white vote, while Hillary Clinton has managed to pull down only about one-quarter of the black vote, yet the question has always been whether he could transcend race. The only rational conclusion to which this points is, again, that it is not race per se that needs to be overcome, but blackness. Whiteness is not seen as negative, as something to be conquered or transcended. Indeed, whereas blacks are being asked to rise above their racial identity, for whites, the burden is exactly the opposite: the worst thing for a white person is to fail to live up to the ostensibly high standards set by whiteness; it is to be considered white trash, which is to say, to be viewed as someone who has let down whiteness and fallen short of its pinnacle. For blacks, the worst thing it seems (at least in the minds of whites) is to be seen as black, which is no doubt why so many whites think it's a compliment to say things to black folks like, "I don't even think of you as black," not realizing that the subtext of such a comment is that it's a damned good thing they don't, for if they did, the person so thought of would be up the proverbial creek for sure.

In what must prove among the greatest ironies of all time, for Barack Obama to become President, which he well may accomplish, he will have to succeed in convincing a lot of racist white people to vote for him. Without the support of racists he simply can't win. While this may seem counterintuitive--that is, after all, what makes it ironic--it is really inarguable. After all, according to many an opinion survey in the past decade, large numbers of whites (often as high as one-half to three-quarters) harbor at least one negative and racist stereotype about African Americans, whether regarding their intelligence, law-abidingness, work ethic, or value systems. Without the votes of at least some of those whites (and keep in mind, that's how many whites are willing to admit to racist beliefs, which is likely far fewer than actually hold them), Obama's candidacy would be sunk. So long as whites can vote for a black man only to the extent that he doesn't remind them of other black people, it is fair to say that white people remain mired in a racism quite profound. To the extent we view the larger black community in terms far more hostile than those reserved for Obama, Oprah, Tiger, Colin, Condoleezza, Denzel and Bill (meaning Cosby, not Clinton, whose blackness is believed to be authentic only by himself nowadays), whites have proven how creative we can be, and how resourceful, when it comes to the maintenance of racial inequality.

By granting exemptions from blackness, even to those black folks who did not ask for such exemptions (and nothing I have said here should be taken as a critique of Obama himself by the way, for whom I did indeed vote last month), we have taken racism to an entirely new and disturbing level, one that bypasses the old and all-encompassing hostilities of the past, and replaces them with a new, seemingly ecumenical acceptance in the present. But make no mistake, it is an ecumenism that depends upon our being made to feel good, and on our ability to glom onto folks of color who won't challenge our denial let alone our privileges, even if they might like to.

In short, the success of Barack Obama has proven, perhaps more so than any other single thing could, just how powerful race remains in America. His success, far from disproving white power and privilege, confirms it with a vengeance.

Barack Obama is not Muslim

2008-03-04T06:29:00.000-08:00

How many million times does that have to be said before it gets through people's heads? My God, I have seen so many comments on blogs, on 60 Minutes, EVERYWHERE! Do people think he's lying? There have been investigations done! He is not Muslim. They interviewed the headmaster of his elementary school. It was not a Muslim school. It was NOT a madrassa. What I find interesting is the people that are most gullible are those who choose not to educate themselves. They're like little lemmings who just follow the crowd and jump over the cliff because all the other lemmings are jumping over the cliff. Please, please, please people...EDUCATE yourselves! Don't believe every email that comes into your Inbox! It's like the people that forward every virus hoax that comes along before verifying it. It absolutely amazes me how many people choose to believe this about Obama without doing their homework, and then when he says he's not Muslim, would rather believe the rumors than believe him!

At the Democratic caucus, one woman there was voting for Clinton because she was worried about Obama and his being a Muslim when he was a child and how that would affect his judgement. Four of us at the table told her that it was not true, that it was just a rumor that was being spread about him. Yet she could not be persuaded that it wasn't true. She was absolutely convinced. What is wrong with these people? Do they WANT to believe this about him for some weird reason?

I read his first memoir, "Dreams of My Father". This was written in his first year after graduating from Harvard Law. There was not one mention of being Muslim. NOT ONE. He did mention the Christian church he belonged to. This was way before he even considered running for President. Isn't that enough proof right there?

The really disgusting thing about this is that the scurrilous email that apparently has been going around is really offensive to Muslims because it suggests that there is something wrong with being a Muslim.

Republicans use his middle name, Hussein, repeatedly. They know that it's code for "Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim, therefore he is anti-Israel, or pro-Palestinian or soft on terrorism." It's gotten to the point where the Republican National Committee has now said, "Don't use Obama's middle name."

Stop the bigotry!

McCain vs. Obama

2008-03-01T08:03:00.000-08:00

Thinking about the strong possibility of a general election where John McCain faces Barack Obama, one cannot help but notice the contrasts between the two. It will be the largest age gap between presidential candidates in American history. There will be the inevitable distinctions drawn between change vs. experience, fresh vs. tested, liberal vs. conservative. But there is another distinction that is extremely obvious, and this is something that not only gives Obama's campaign its energy, but tends to drag McCain's campaign down. Frank Rich wrote about it in the New York Times:

The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama
By Frank Rich

THE curse continues. Regardless of party, it’s hara-kiri for a politician to step into the shadow of even a mediocre speech by Barack Obama.

Senator Obama’s televised victory oration celebrating his Chesapeake primary trifecta on Tuesday night was a mechanical rehash. No matter. When the networks cut from the 17,000-plus Obama fans cheering at a Wisconsin arena to John McCain’s victory tableau before a few hundred spectators in the Old Town district of Alexandria, Va., it was a rerun of what happened to Hillary Clinton the night she lost Iowa. Senator McCain, backed by a collection of sallow-faced old Beltway pols, played the past to Mr. Obama’s here and now. Mr. McCain looked like a loser even though he, unlike Senator Clinton, had actually won.

But he has it even worse than Mrs. Clinton. What distinguished his posse from Mr. Obama’s throng was not just its age but its demographic monotony: all white and nearly all male. Such has been the inescapable Republican brand throughout this campaign, ever since David Letterman memorably pegged its lineup of presidential contenders last spring as “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”

For Mr. McCain, this albatross may be harder to shake than George W. Bush and Iraq, particularly in a faceoff with Mr. Obama. When Mr. McCain jokingly invoked the Obama slogan “I am fired up and ready to go” in his speech Tuesday night, it was as cringe-inducing as the white covers of R & B songs in the 1950s — or Mitt Romney’s stab at communing with his inner hip-hop on Martin Luther King’s birthday. Trapped in an archaic black-and-white newsreel, the G.O.P. looks more like a nostalgic relic than a national political party in contemporary America. A cultural sea change has passed it by.

The 2008 primary campaign has been so fast and furious that we haven’t paused to register just how spectacular that change is. All the fretful debate about whether voters would turn out for a candidate who is a black or a woman seems a century ago. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama vanquished the Democratic field, including a presidential-looking Southern white man with an
enthusiastic following, John Edwards. What was only months ago an exotic political experiment
is now almost ho-hum.

Given that the American story has been so inextricable from the struggle over race, the Obama triumph has been the bigger surprise to many. Perhaps because I came of age in the racially
divided Washington public schools of the 1960s and had one of my first newspaper jobs in Richmond in the early 1970s, I almost had to pinch myself when Mr. Obama took 52 percent of
Virginia’s white vote last week. The Old Dominion continues to astonish those who remember it when.

Here’s one of my memories. In 1970, Linwood Holton, the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction and a Richard Nixon supporter, responded to court-ordered busing by voluntarily placing his own children in largely black Richmond public schools. For this symbolic gesture, he was marginalized by his own party, which was hellbent on pursuing the emergent
Strom Thurmond-patented Southern strategy of exploiting white racism for political gain. After Mr. Holton, Virginia restored to office the previous governor, Mills Godwin, a champion of the state’s “massive resistance” to desegregation.

Today Anne Holton, the young daughter sent by her father to a black school in Richmond, is the first lady of Virginia, the wife of the Democratic governor, Tim Kaine. Mr. Kaine’s early endorsement of Mr. Obama was a potent factor in his remarkable 28-point landslide on
Tuesday.

For all the changes in Virginia and elsewhere, vestiges of the Southern strategy persist in some Republican quarters. Mr. McCain, however, has been a victim, rather than a practitioner, of the old racial gamesmanship. In his brutal 2000 South Carolina primary battle against Mr. Bush and Karl Rove, Mr. McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter was the target of a smear campaign. He was also pilloried for accurately describing the Confederate flag as a “symbol of racism and slavery.” (Sadly, he started to bend this straight talk the very next day.) He is still paying for correctly describing Jerry Falwell, once an ardent segregationist, and Pat Robertson, a longtime defender of South African apartheid, as “agents of intolerance.” And of course Mr. McCain remains public enemy No. 1 to some in his party for resisting nativist overkill on illegal immigration.

Though Mr. Bush ran for president on “compassionate conservatism,” he diversified only his party’s window dressing: a 2000 Republican National Convention that had more African-Americans onstage than on the floor and the incessant photo-ops with black schoolchildren to sell No Child Left Behind. There are no black Republicans in the House or the Senate to stand
with the party’s 2008 nominee. Exit polls tell us that African-Americans voting in this year’s G.O.P. primaries account for at most 2 to 4 percent of its electorate even in states with large black populations.

Mr. Obama’s ascension hardly means that racism is kaput in America, or that the country is “postracial” or “transcending race.” But it’s impossible to deny that another barrier has been surmounted. Bill Clinton’s attempt to minimize Mr. Obama as a niche candidate in South Carolina by comparing him to Jesse Jackson looks more ludicrous by the day. Even when winning five Southern states (Virginia included) on Super Tuesday in 1988, Mr. Jackson received only 7 to 10 percent of white votes, depending on the exit poll.

Whatever the potency of his political skills and message, Mr. Obama is also riding a demographic wave. The authors of the new book “Millennial Makeover,” Morley Winograd and Michael D.
Hais, point out that the so-called millennial generation (dating from 1982) is the largest in
American history, boomers included, and that roughly 40 percent of it is African-American, Latino, Asian or racially mixed. One in five millennials has an immigrant parent. It’s this generation that is fueling the excitement and some of the record turnout of the Democratic primary campaign, and not just for Mr. Obama.

Even by the low standards of his party, Mr. McCain has underperformed at reaching millennials in the thriving culture where they live. His campaign’s effort to create a MySpace-like Web site flopped. His most-viewed appearances on YouTube are not viral videos extolling him or
replaying his best speeches but are instead sendups of his most reckless foreign-policy improvisations — his threat to stay in Iraq for 100 years and his jokey warning (sung to the tune of the Beach Boys’ version of “Barbara Ann”) that he will bomb Iran. In the vast arena of the Internet he has been shrunk to Grumpy Old White Guy, the G.O.P. brand incarnate.

The theory of the McCain candidacy is that his “maverick” image will bring independents (approaching a third of all voters) to the rescue. But a New York Times-CBS News poll last month found that independents have even a lower opinion of Mr. Bush, the war, the surge and
the economy than the total electorate and skew slightly younger. Though the independents in this survey went 44 percent to 32 percent for Mr. Bush over John Kerry in 2004, they now prefer a Democratic presidential candidate over a Republican by 44 percent to 27 percent.

Mr. McCain could get lucky, especially if Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination and unites the G.O.P., and definitely if she tosses her party into civil war by grabbing ghost delegates from Michigan and Florida. But those odds are dwindling. More likely, the Republican Party will face Mr. Obama with a candidate who reeks even more of the past and less of change than Mrs.
Clinton does. I was startled to hear last week from a friend in California, a staunch anti-Clinton Republican businessman, that he was wavering. Though he regards Mr. McCain as a hero, he wrote me: “I am tired of fighting the Vietnam war. I have drifted toward Obama.”

Similarly, Mark McKinnon, the Bush media maven who has played a comparable role for Mr. McCain in this campaign, reaffirmed to Evan Smith of Texas Monthly weeks ago that he would not work for his own candidate in a race with Mr. Obama. Elaborating to NPR last week, Mr. McKinnon said that while he is “100 percent” for Mr. McCain and disagrees with Mr. Obama “on very fundamental issues,” he likes Mr. Obama and what he’s doing for the country enough to stay on the sidelines rather than fire off attack ads.

As some Republicans drift away in a McCain-Obama race, who fills the vacuum? Among the white guys flanking Mr. McCain at his victory celebration on Tuesday, revealingly enough,
was the once-golden George Allen, the Virginia Republican who lost his Senate seat and
presidential hopes in 2006 after being caught on YouTube calling a young Indian-American Democratic campaign worker “macaca.”

In that incident, Mr. Allen added insult to injury by also telling the young man, “Welcome to
America and the real world of Virginia.” As election results confirmed both in 2006 and last week, it is Mr. Allen who is the foreigner in 21st century America, Mr. Allen who is in the minority in the real world of Virginia. A national rout in 2008 just may be that Republican Party’s last stand.

Thoughts on being a leader...

2008-02-20T11:24:00.000-08:00

I found two quotes that I feel really sum up quite nicely why Barack Obama is clearly heading toward the Democratic nomination for President of the United States...

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." - John Quincy Adams

"What Mrs. Clinton has that Mr. Obama does not have, Mr. Obama can get. What Mr. Obama has that Mrs. Clinton does not have, she can never get." - Alec Baldwin

A Statistic About Cardiac Arrest

2008-02-19T20:48:00.000-08:00

Tonight, as I was doing my nightly scan of online articles to see if Obama had won the Wisconsin and Hawaii primaries, an article caught my eye on msnbc.com. The title of the article was "Hospital's 'Code blue' most deadly at night". The reason it caught my eye was because I went into cardiac arrest in the hospital after the birth of my daughter Karina, and a Code blue was called, at night. I was interested in what the article had to say.

Apparently, they define night time to be after 11 PM. (I went into cardiac arrest sometime between 6:30 and 8:00 PM and my anesthesiologist was in the room when it happened, so resuscitation began immediately.) Graveyard shift tends to be less staffed and when someone goes into cardiac arrest, hospital employees may not be paying as much attention in the middle of the night as during the day. But what really caught my eye is this statistic: 80 to 85 percent of people who go into cardiac arrest in the hospital DIE IN THE HOSPITAL. Only 20 percent of people who go into cardiac arrest during daytime hours survive. Only 15 percent who go into cardiac arrest in the middle of the night survive.

These statistics again remind me how lucky I am to be here.

And They Say The Young Are Apathetic

2008-02-12T10:41:00.000-08:00

Check out this video...this interviewer picked the wrong Obama supporter to try to railroad.

http://thinkonthesethings.wordpress.com/2008/02/06/video-interviewer-picks-the-wrong-obama-supporter-to-try-to-railroad/

After watching the video, check this second video out...Derrick talks a bit more about his background and gives an even more impassioned argument as to why he is supporting Obama. Whereas the first video talks more about policy, this one is more of his emotional response. Excellent.

http://thinkonthesethings.wordpress.com/2008/02/12/video-obama-supporter-derrick-responds-to-his-video/

I am hard pressed to find anyone who can articulate their position as well as this young man! These are Obama supporters! Yeah!

Comparing Obama and Clinton's Campaigns

2008-02-12T09:48:00.000-08:00

Last night I was having a passionate discussion with family members about the obvious reasons Obama should be the Democratic nominee. As I thought back over our conversation, another reason crossed my mind. Look at the way their campaigns are going.

Obama's campaign has been bringing in millions of dollars, mostly from small donors. He has inspired voters from all walks of life, all races, all ages, to become involved. He has done something that hasn't been seen since John F. Kennedy, and that is inspire a nation. HE IS A LEADER. That is what a President is. His campaign is a well-oiled machine that has run with integrity, and without the help of lobbyists. If he were President, it would be fair to assume his Administration would run this way as well.

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton has run out of money. She has already had to loan her campaign $5 million out of her own personal fortune. Her campaign manager has resigned. She has taken money from lobbyists. She has attacked Obama and her husband was chastised by Democratic party leaders for his attacks as well. When her people are questioned, they spin and spin and never answer questions directly. Would it be fair to assume that her Administration would run this way as well? It appears as if her campaign is falling apart, and she truly appears like a desparate woman. She also seems to be hinging her nomination on a few big states, whereas Obama obviously can garner votes from all over the country.

I also recently discovered that in New Hampshire, the Clinton campaign misled female state senators to sign a letter attacking Obama's women's rights record. After the New Hampshire primary, the senators appologized for misleading people about his record and took issue with the Clinton campaign's practices. This incident left great division among women's rights activists in New Hampshire.

When women's rights came under attack in South Dakoat, women's rights activists asked all the senators in Congress to write a letter and help fundraise on their behalf. Obama was the only Senator who did so. Clinton did not.

Clinton has also tried to mislead voters about Obama's commitment to helping victims of sexual abuse, an issue on which he has been a strong advocate.

So why are so many middle-aged women voting for Clinton? Is it just because they desperately want to see a woman in the White House? I feel that is not the right reason to put a person in the White House. I would love to have a woman in the White House, but I truly believe that you need to choose the right PERSON, and not just vote for them BECAUSE they're a woman. I believe, and I think millions of people agree with me, that Barack Obama is the better PERSON for the job, regardless of race or gender.

Thoughts on caucusing

2008-02-10T10:18:00.001-08:00

Yesterday was the second time I've caucused, and it was a great experience. I loved getting together with other people and talking about politics. This was an extremely important event because the results of the caucus was going to determine the delegate count for Clinton and Obama, and right now, they are in a race for delegates. The turnout for this caucus was double the turnout of the 2004 caucuses. I honestly attribute this to the inspiration of Barack Obama, who is influencing people to get involved all across the nation.

However, I also wondered, why are there so many who don't caucus? Yesterday morning, there were so many people who said to me, "Have fun at the caucus today!" I thought to myself, these people are Democrats, why aren't they going to the caucus? Don't they want their voices to be heard?

The fact of the matter is, many people don't like politics, or don't care that much about politics. They are uncomfortable talking about politics, or thinking about openly discussing why they prefer one candidate over another. Maybe they feel they cannot articulate why. Maybe they have other work responsibilities (although the fact that it was on a Saturday afternoon would make it more accessible for those who work during the week). Maybe some believe their vote won't make a difference.

So what happens is that those who are highly motivated, and usually more educated about the issues, are the ones who attend the caucuses. Obama has tended to attract the more educated voters, and as a result, has done well in the caucuses. Personally, I like the fact that people can discuss their votes openly. It was interesting at yesterday's caucus how one Clinton supporter at our table actually believed that Obama had a childhood background as a Muslim and was afraid to vote for him because of that. Even though we told her it was all rumor and not fact, she did not believe us and was absolutely certain that these rumors were true! I think this open discussion actually is a great forum for talking about these issues.

I think another issue, and this has been talked about in quite a few blogs, is the fact that when a person votes openly in a caucus, that peerson would be less likely to want to expose any prejudices. They're held accountable for their votes. They're less likely to say, "Well, I'm not voting for Obama because he's black," whereas in the privacy of the voting booth, a scenario like that is more likely to happen. Who wants to be seen as outwardly racist?

Even though primaries are more convenient, and are more inclusive of the general population, I would hope that everyone who votes educates him or herself on the strengths and weaknesses of the two candidates and makes an INFORMED decision. I truly believe that those who go to the caucuses have at least thought long and hard about who they want and do not take it lightly. The fact that Obama beat Clinton in Washington by 2-1 voters speaks volumes.

I'm an Obama Delegate!!!!!

2008-02-09T20:09:00.000-08:00

Today was the Democratic Caucus in Washington State. My precinct caucus was held in the gym of Woodmont Elementary School, where my children attend. The gym was already packed when I arrived at 12:50 PM. I ended up being the caucus chair for my table, which meant I led the caucus for the people sitting at my table, who were from my immediate neighborhood. Of the 22 people at our table 14 voted for Obama and 8 for Clinton. Which meant we were allotted 3 Obama delegates and 1 Clinton delegate (plus 3 alternate Obama delegates and 1 alternate Clinton delegate). Then we had a discussion in which people spoke up for their candidate, trying to persuade others to switch their vote. In the end, the Obama folks were able to get two people to switch their vote from Clinton to Obama; however, it didn't end up in a change in delegate count.

I am going to be a delegate to the legislative district caucus in April! I am so thrilled! Go Obama!

In other news today, my daughter, Karina, was selected to be on the U-10 Development A team for the Federal Way Reign Select Soccer Club. Go Karina!

Barack Obama Rally

2008-02-08T20:25:00.000-08:00

Today I went to the Barack Obama Stand for Change Rally at the Key Arena in Seattle. It was one of the most awe-inspiring events I've been to in my life!!!! The arena was filled with an energy and excitement that was palpable. Even outside, just arriving, people were running into line, as if they just couldn't wait to hear from this man who is inspiring a nation to come together to change the way the things are done in our country. We waited a long time in our seats, watching Obama videos overhead, doing the wave, watching a crazy dance-off between two women in the stands. And finally, when Obama finally did enter the arena, there was a deafening roar, as if Obama were the biggest rock star on the planet. Key Arena was filled to capacity, 18,000 people, and there were 3,000 people out in the plaza who could not get in, listening to him speak through loudspeakers. Incredible. He speaks without notes, and when he talked about hope, that hope does not preclude being a realist, that hope is what gave slaves freedom, hope is what gave women the right to vote, hope is what gave African-Americans the right to sit at the same lunch counter as whites, my eyes started welling up. Things do not begin to change without hope.

Mind Your Asthma

2007-11-27T09:47:00.000-08:00

For the past month now, I've been battling with my asthma symptoms.

I developed asthma when I was pregnant with my son. I've had allergies all my life, and during my pregnancy in 1996, I had a cough that wouldn't go away. I saw a pulmonologist and discovered that I had allergy-induced asthma. I was put on a corticosteroid inhaler and that lessened my asthma symptoms. For many years my asthma was under control, and I actually stopped using the inhaler for quite a while with no problem.

In 1998, after I gave birth to my daughter, I suffered an Amniotic Fluid Embolism. It is a long story, but suffice it to say, it was an experience that changed my life. While in the ICU, I developed Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, which is basically acute lung failure. I was on a ventilator for nine weeks (intubated for four weeks and on a trach for five weeks) and now have scarring in my lungs.

Because I am an ARDS survivor, my asthma has been exacerbated. Whenever I get a cold or my allergies start to act up, my asthma symptoms start to flare up. A year ago, despite the fact that I received a flu shot, I caught the flu from my children. My asthma symptoms became extremely severe, my peak flow was in the red zone, and I ended up in the ER with pneumonia.

This latest episode started when I caught a cold from my daughter. The problem is, I should be doing my corticosteroid inhaler ALL THE TIME, even when I feel good, because that is what keeps my airways open consistently. But I don't. So I caught the cold, and it wouldn't go away. I coughed and coughed. Then it turned to coughing and wheezing. And now it's at the point that I can't even walk up the stairs without becoming short of breath and doing a full exhalation. I was at the mall and I wanted to do a half-hour walk yesterday, and after 15 minutes I felt like I was having an attack, and ended up at the doctor's office. So now I'm on a short high dose burst of oral prednisone. I'm really afraid of possible side effects, but just after my first dose last night, I'm already starting to feel better.

So if you have asthma, keep taking your steroid inhaler, even if you feel okay! I guess I have to learn the hard way...

A New Beginning

2007-11-12T18:32:00.000-08:00

Sometimes we need to make changes in our lives that are difficult to make. Difficult because they go against society's expectation of what makes sense. I subscribe to a blog called 37 Days and back in February 2007, Patti Digh wrote about Letting Go of the Monkey Bar. I feel like I've just let go of the monkey bar myself, although holding on to that bar was not a desirable alternative for me. And although I'm in that space between trapezes, that space after having let go and before grabbing another one, I feel a sense of peace, a sense of a huge burden lifted.

This past weekend was great! Karina's soccer team, the Federal Way Wildcats, won their last league game to end the season with 8 wins and 1 tie. They then played two indoor games and after a bit of a shaky start trying to get used to the much faster game during their first game and playing an older team and losing 0-2, they got it together in their second game and won 9-2. They then played in the Narrows Jamboree and went undefeated in three games. Afterwards, we went to Browns Point Pizzeria and surprised Hannah and Glaysia with a birthday celebration!

Racial Profiling

2007-11-04T19:47:00.000-08:00

After a discussion I had today about racial profiling, I feel compelled to post this excerpt from an article by the ACLU titled "Racial Profiling: Old and New".

Is racial profiling real? Most Americans think so. A July 2001 Gallup poll
reported that 55 percent of whites and 83 percent of blacks believe racial
profiling is widespread. And the reports of thousands of racial and ethnic group
members across the country add credibility to the perception that racial
profiling is real. These are stories from all walks of life, not just
hardworking everyday people, but celebrities, professional athletes, and members
of the military. Also, reports of racial profiling come from respected members
of communities of color such as police commanders, prosecutors, judges, state
legislators, lawyers, dentists and even representatives in Congress, who have
been victims.

Racial profiling is a new term for an old practice known by other
names: institutional racism and discrimination and owes its existence to
prejudice that has existed in this country since slavery.

Tens of thousands of innocent drivers, pedestrians, and shoppers across
the country are victims of racial profiling. And these discriminatory police
stops and searches have reached epidemic proportions in recent years - fueled by
the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Terror" that have given police a pretext to
target people they think fit a "drug courier," "gang member," or "terrorist"
profile. In fact, racial profiling is the first step in a long road that leads
to the heavily disproportionate incarceration of people of color, especially
young men, for drug-related crimes, and of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians for
suspicion of terrorism. This despite the fact that people of color are no more
likely than whites to use or sell drugs, and Arabs Muslims and South Asians are
no more likely than whites to be terrorists.

We must end the practice of racial profiling.

Seeing the World Through Different Lenses

2007-10-14T10:54:00.000-07:00

My favorite journalist is Leonard Pitts, Jr. of the Miami Herald. He writes an op-ed piece every Sunday that also appears in the Seattle Times. He won the most coveted award in 2004, the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He writes thought-provoking columns on wide-ranging issues that affect our society, and whether you agree with him or not, he makes you think. I happen to agree with almost everything he has written.

Today's column is on the disturbing trend of the noose. The noose that has been displayed as a sign of hatred toward African-Americans. Here is an excerpt from the column:

"A noose is left for a black workman at a construction site in the Chicago area. In Queens, a woman brandishes a noose to threaten her black neighbors. A noose is left on the door of a black professor at Columbia University. And that's just last week. Go back a little further and you have similar incidents at the University of Maryland in College Park, at a police department on Long Island, on a Coast Guard cutter, in a bus maintenance garage in Pittsburgh.

Mark Potok, the director of the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told USA Today, 'For a dozen incidents to come to the public's attention is a lot. I don't generally see noose incidents in a typical month. We might hear about a handful in a year.'

The superintendent of schools in Jena famously dismissed the original incident as a 'prank.' It was an astonishing response, speaking volumes about the blithe historical ignorance of people who have found it convenient not to peer too closely at the atrocities of the past lest they be accidentally . . . moved."

In the column, Pitts discusses the history of the rope/noose as a symbol of hate toward African-Americans. It is an ugly part of American history that African-Americans were lynched from trees, and even though that doesn't happen anymore, racism is still alive and well, both subtly and overtly.

What disturbs me, however, are the comments that I read in response to Pitts' column. It's the same phenomenon I saw with the Don Imus scandal. There are definitely people who do not view the world through the same lens as people who have experienced racism. They absolutely cannot see the racist acts in the displaying of the noose and dismiss them as "pranks." Their outrage is reserved for Pitts, as opposed to the perpetrators of these heinous acts.

I just recently received a blog post from a friend, Patti Digh, who talked about the racism that still exists in our country. I am reminded of it everyday when I read posts such as the diatribes against Leonard Pitts. I am reminded of it when I stand in line at the grocery store and see cover story after cover story about pretty white women and girls who are missing, but have yet to hear about one woman of color or one little girl of color on the national news. Wait, I take that back, on The Today Show, there was one story about an African-American woman who went missing, and there was NEVER a follow-up story. NEVER. Not the 24-7 coverage that Laci Peterson, Lori Hacking and Chandra Levy warranted.

Our society seems to care more about a runaway bride than a 9-year-old African-American girl who is shot in the head when caught in the middle of a firefight in the housing projects of Miami. Pitts wrote in his column that this violence, this sacrifice of children was symptomatic of an American problem. The response to Pitts: No, it's not our problem. It's your problem. It's your problem. It's a black problem. Pitts' response: So I guess it's only an American problem when white schools and colleges get shot to pieces.

My friend Patti wrote something in her blog that sums this up perfectly:

"Hate crimes won't end until those of us who are not hated are as outraged as those who are."

Well-Crafted Phoniness

2007-10-13T10:16:00.000-07:00

Here is a great blog by Jeffrey Feldman that talks about Bob Herbert's brilliant observations regarding Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize, and our society's penchant for electing "barbecue buddies" over those who are truly intelligent, thoughtful and talented.

We are now paying the price.

Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize

2007-10-12T10:22:00.000-07:00

It was announced this morning that Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for being "probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted to combat climate change", according to his citation.

I bet the right-wing pundits are gnashing their teeth right about now.

Does the Federal Way School District still need to require an "opposite viewpoint" when showing "An Inconvenient Truth"? Puhleeze.

I'll Take Ron Walker

2007-10-10T14:45:00.000-07:00

In the upcoming November election, there are two candidates for the Federal Way School Board vying for the District 5 spot--Dave Larson and Ron Walker. Last Thursday, I met Dave Larson for the first time at the Multicultural Night I coordinated at my children's elementary school. He seemed like an affable fellow, and I appreciated the fact that he took the time to attend our event.

However, when it comes to the School Board, I'm going to cast my vote for Ron Walker. Apparently Dave Larson was one of three School Board members who voted for a ludicrous policy last year--that any showing of "An Inconvenient Truth" in a Federal Way high school had to be balanced by an opposite viewpoint. Their actions made the Federal Way School District the laughing stock of the country. According to Larson, he felt "a political partisan was presenting a contested political/scientific issue to impressionable youth."

You have got to be kidding me. These conservatives politicize this issue because it is Al Gore presenting it, and completely dismiss the myriads of scientists who back up what Gore says. And they even lend credence to the parent who was the catalyst for this ridiculous policy--Frosty Hardison, who claims that the earth is 14,000 years old and that the Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that this viewpoint is not presented in "An Incovenient Truth." It was upon receipt of Hardison's email that Larson imposed a moratorium on Gore's film.

Why do I want Ron Walker on the School Board? He has been very active in the Federal Way Community for many years, both in the School District, in the city, and on the Diversity Commission. The School District is made up of 43% students of color, and it is important that the School Board is reflective of the population of the school district, so that the interests of the students are truly understood.

Dave Larson does not represent the majority of the Federal Way community. He represents his own political interests (even though the School Board is supposed to be non-partisan). He even admitted that he was naive about how the "Inconvenient Truth" fiasco would play out in the national media.

Let's get some new blood on the Federal Way School Board!

A long, hot summer

2007-08-08T18:41:00.000-07:00

Some random thoughts-

I was watching "The Today Show" this morning and noticed that most of the country was experiencing weather above 100 degrees. Very strange. Yet the global warming skeptics still claim that global warming is a hoax... I teach a class called "Multiculturalism/Anti-Bias in Education" online for Green River Community College every summer and I posted on the Discussion Forum that my students will have to be prepared to deal with some of these types of parents when they have their own classrooms--parents who want to ban books, ban movies like "An Inconvenient Truth", and basically censor everything else they deem inappropriate based on their Biblical interpretations. UGH.

Hey, I just created a website for fans of High School Musical. Both my kids and I love the movie (being a former musical theatre performer myself, I can totally relate) and so I decided to create site with info about the movie, cast members, and latest news and events. The URL is http://www.highschoolmusical2fan.com

This summer has been a major soccer summer--spent a weekend in Lake Oswego with Giancarlo's select soccer team (Storm '96 Green) at the Lake Oswego Nike Cup, then Karina guest played in a tournament with the Federal Way Shooting Stars in Renton , this weekend Giancarlo's team plays in the Blast Off tournament in Federal Way, and finally Karina's team will be playing in the Port Orchard Root Beer Jamboree in late August. Then after Labor Day, fall soccer season starts! We just love soccer!

Today Alie finally got her driver's license! Yea!

CBS and MSNBC did the right thing

2007-04-14T08:16:00.000-07:00

This is a seminal moment in our country's history. Regardless of the motives of CBS and MSNBC for firing Don Imus in the wake of this scandal, it still gives pause to those who think it is okay to spew hate from their mouths.

For too long people in the broadcasting industry have been too willing to turn a deaf ear to the racist and sexist trash that have come out of the mouths of the likes of Imus and other shock jocks. Then when they go "over the top", they apologize and go right back to doing what they do. Imus had been doing that for over 30 years. The fact that he was paid $10 million to do that is institutionalized racism, pure and simple.

People who are up in arms about his firing are talking about his right to free speech. He absolutely has a right to free speech, but he DOES NOT have a right to a talk show, and CBS and MSNBC also have the right to fire someone they feel will not be profitable--apparently when Proctor and Gamble and Staples pulled out, the networks pulled the rug out from Don Imus. I am not so naive to think it was just because of his words, because if it were, they would have canned him immediately. I do believe there was a profit motive. But it was all connected, and finally people, and companies are beginning to see that they do not want to be associated with someone who makes his living by spewing hate.

There was another very interesting thing that I really didn't notice until it was pointed out to me. I read about it on Jon Landau's blog published in the Huffington Post:

"For some reason, people who make no secret of the fact that they despise Al Sharpton feel that they are doing something meaningful by engaging with him at times of crisis on racial issues. In going to him, they are seeking out someone who they think is disliked by large portions of the white audience, which they think puts them at an advantage. In the long run it doesn't. But instead of this knee jerk move, how about for once agreeing to talk to a professional news person like Tavis Smiley, an exceptional broadcaster, Errol Lewis of the New York Daily News, a terrific writer and broadcaster, the under appreciated Bob Herbert of the New York Times, or for that matter, Clarence Page, who challenged Imus on race many years ago, and was never heard from again on his airwaves. (Tom Oliphant, perhaps Mr. Page was more deserving of your solidarity than Imus is.) The assumption that the only place one has to go to make "media peace" is with Sharpton is in its own way subtly racist. And the MSM (mainstream media) encourages it."

I find this to be the case in every racial issue that comes up. When Michael Richards said the "n-word", he immediately went on to Al Sharpton's show. Why not discuss it with Tavis Smiley? Finally, yesterday on "The Today Show", Tavis Smiley, Clarence Page and several other African-American spokespeople who are not considered as "controversial" were guests on the show and spoke about the Imus issue in ways that made sense and would be extremely difficult to argue against. I wonder if that is why the MSM does not encourage racial offenders to go head to head with people like Tavis Smiley and Clarence Page?

What happened is even though Don Imus was the one who made the offensive and racist comment, it got turned around and Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson became the targets. Everywhere I turn I see comments about Al Sharpton's and Jesse Jackson's history. This is NOT about Sharpton and Jackson!!!! So if they hate Sharpton and Jackson so much, then why do they engage with them about racial issues? Go to African-American broadcasters they respect! But they won't do it because the mainstream media itself is playing the "race card".

I really hope this begins a dialogue on what is and is not acceptable on the airwaves. There is no room for hate speech in this country. And I'm all for getting rid of rap music that denigrates women and using the n-word too. It's all bad. It's a new day.

The Don Imus scandal - emblematic of a larger societal problem?

2007-04-11T10:19:00.000-07:00

Unless you've been buried under a rock somewhere, you've probably heard by now about the racist and sexist comments radio broadcaster Don Imus made about the Rutgers University women's basketball team. In case you haven't, on his radio show he was talking to his producer about them, how he thought they were really "rough" looking and then proceeded to call them "nappy-headed hos". This comment was made about a basketball team that started at the bottom, perservered, and made it all the way to the finals, representing a prestigious university. To taint their accomplishment in that way was despicable, disgusting and abhorrent. Imus called it comedy.

Some people are calling for his firing. MSNBC is suspending him for two weeks. Sponsors such as Proctor and Gamble and Staples have pulled ads from his show. Bigelow Teas is revisiting whether it wants to advertise on the show.

However, what is disturbing to me is the number of people who think Don Imus should not even have been suspended. I just went to the MSNBC website to vote on whether Don Imus should be fired, suspended, or whether suspension was even too much. 33% felt Imus should be fired. 30% felt a two-week suspension was enough. But 38% felt that Imus should not even have been suspended, and that he was a shock jock, it was his job to shock people.

What does this say about our society? Granted, 157,000 voted, and it is not a scientific survey, but I've been reading a great deal about this scandal, and quite a few people feel that everyone should just get over it, Imus made a mistake, let him get his wrists slapped and move on from it.

The problem with this is that these sorts of comments are made over and over again in the public venue with no repercussions other than public embarrassment for the person saying it. Yes, we do have freedom of speech in this country, but where has the sense of decency gone where people in power can call people the "n-word" or "nappy-headed hos" and get away with it? People are trying to compare this with rappers saying the n-word and while I do not agree with rappers using that word or putting down women, I believe that this is an issue of power, and rappers do not wield the same power as a Don Imus using the phrase "nappy-headed ho" or a political candidate using the word "macaca" or even Michael Richards using the "n-word".

In the last two weeks the newspapers have been filled with misunderstandings between the races. Danny Westneat, a columnist for the Seattle Times wrote of his frustration with the Seattle School District and his perception that the district was "obsessed with race". He was bombarded with hundreds of responses, some agreeing with him and others accusing him of "not getting it" and suffering from unexamined white privilege. He was open to discussing the issues although in his follow-up article, he still didn't seem to "get it" and did acknowledge perhaps it was due to his own white privilege. He also felt that he probably wasn't really very good at talking about race and hoped the new superintendent would be better at talking about it. Interestingly enough, one of the candidates for Seattle Schools Superintendent says about race, "We should all stop talking about it and deal with it." Okay, but how do you deal with it if you don't talk about it?

Unfortunately in our society, many people don't want to talk about it. When people of color bring it up as an issue, they're accused of bringing up "the race card". But the fact of the matter is, if a person of color is in a group where they are the only person of color, it is disingenuous to think that race might not come up as an issue if that person is feeling isolated or disenfranchised. Many white people do not understand this until I pose this question: "If you walked into a meeting, and you were the only white person, and everyone else was African-American, and you were feeling isolated and left out, do you think that part of the reason might be because you're white?" And of course, everyone says yes. However, the fact of the matter is most whites are never in this situation so it is difficult for them to envision being "the one and only" or to envision a situation where race is an issue for them. They don't live in a world where it is. Our society is one where whites are in power, whites can walk into a room or a workplace, and pretty much count on the fact that the majority of people will look like them. So when people of color bring up race, they accuse us of playing the race card, when in fact it may be a valid point.

As a diversity trainer and multicultural educator, it is my job to talk about race, as well as all dimensions of diversity. It's important that we start feeling comfortable talking about our differences as well as our similarities. Until we can start talking about our differences in a safe, non-threatening way, these problems will continue to divide us.

For an excellent blog by Jon Landau about the Don Imus scandal go to the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jon-landau/imus-words-recognizing-_b_45532.html

The Michael Richards debacle

2006-11-26T12:37:00.000-08:00

The recent scandal involving Michael Richards' rant at the Laugh Factory comedy club, and the resulting discussion about whether or not he is a racist again makes me wonder what makes some people want to deny the obvious. When a person is up on stage yelling "Look, there's a n*****! There's a n*****!" Or "Fifty years ago we'd have had a f****** fork up your a**!" Those aren't just angry words. Those are words stemming from racial hatred.

What was also very telling was that during his rambling apology on "The David Letterman Show", he used the term "Afro-Americans", a term for African-Americans that has not been used since the 1970's. There were giggles from the audience when he used the term, which he addressed and made a comment that perhaps the Letterman Show wasn't the proper forum for his apology. He is clearly clueless about just how uneducated and stupid he sounded when he used that term.

My favorite columnist, Leonard Pitts, Jr., of The Miami Herald, wrote an excellent column today about the Michael Richards debacle and some of his thoughts. It's an excellent commentary on just what racism is.

Richards' rant leaves no doubt he's a racist
By Leonard Pitts, Jr.

You'd think one of the first things a stand-up comic learns is how to deal with hecklers. One recalls Richard Pryor's jab at some fool who blew a whistle during his monologue. ''This ain't Kool and the Gang, motherfornicator!'' Except, he didn't say motherfornicator.

Apparently, Michael Richards was absent from Comedy 101 the day they studied Heckler Management. Hence, his epic, headline-making meltdown. It happened last week after Richards was razzed -- benignly, by most accounts -- by some black folks in the crowd.

As a result, a pointed question is now being debated: Is Michael Richards a racist? Let me save us all a lot of time: Yes. It seems obvious that Seinfeld's Kramer, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding, has no use for, as he put it in his rambling, disjointed, and painful-to-watch apology on Letterman, ``Afro Americans.''

I have a reader who would disagree on that. She sent an e-mail hoping to preempt my calling Richards racist. She asked that I consider the possibility he's no bigot but simply a man who, in anger, reached instinctively for the most hurtful language he could find. We've all been there, right?

HE MEANT IT

Well, no. Richards' rant, according to the video of it online, lasted a good 2 ½ minutes. You might angrily snap that somebody is a ''fat so-and-so'' without really meaning it. You don't spend 2 ½ minutes calling them fat unless fat is exactly what you mean.

What bothers me most about my reader's explanation is that she felt compelled to postulate an alternate reason for Richards' behavior. Evidently she found the likeliest reason too hard to accept.

Nor is she alone. TMZ.com, the website that obtained the video, polled its users with this question: Is Richards a racist? Forty percent of the respondents said no.

Granted, the survey is not scientific, but it is instructive. And no, it makes no difference to me that some black people freely use the same word Richards did. I consider them just as hateful as I do him, except with them, it's hatred of self.

But frankly, Richards is not the point here. He's just a TV used-to-be who has likely immolated what remains of his career. So be it.

BLATANT AND UNMISTAKABLE

But if so many of my white countrymen refuse to recognize racism when it is this blatant and unmistakable, what expectation can we have that they will do so when it is subtle and covert? In other words, when it is what it usually is.

Modern bigotry usually isn't some nitwit screaming the N-word. It is jobs you don't get and loans you don't get and apartments you don't get and healthcare you don't get and justice you don't get, for reasons you get all too clearly, even though no one ever quite speaks them. Or needs to. It is smiles in your face and knives in your back. And it is, yes, a sitcom -- like Seinfeld -- that presents New York City, of all places, as a black-free zone.

These are complaints African Americans have sought for years to drive home only to be met largely by indifference, the defensive apathy of those who are free to ignore or diminish any claim on conscience that makes them uncomfortable. At the risk of metaphor abuse, the response to this debacle makes clear that you can't explain Advanced Racism to those who haven't passed Racism 101.

And, with all due respect to my correspondent, that need to make excuses gets old. The man spent 2 ½ minutes screaming racial insults. You say that's not racism?

Then, pray tell, what is?

The Anniversary of Katrina

2006-08-27T11:31:00.000-07:00

It has been a year since Hurricane Katrina and there have been numerous stories about the lack of progress in New Orleans, particularly in the Lower Ninth Ward. Most of the people who lived in this predominantly black, lower-income neighborhood have been displaced, and are living in other parts of the country or in FEMA trailers. They had no flood insurance. Contrast this with the wealthier neighborhoods in New Orleans, where residents are busy rebuilding, using their insurance money to rebuild their homes.

There have been many lessons learned from Katrina, and many ugly truths revealed by Katrina. This morning I read the top story in the Seattle Times about a 13-year-old girl who had been raped by a caregiver who had been employed by YouthCare, a non-profit organization that was supposed to provide a safe haven for runaway adolescents. The Seattle Times has been opening up court cases that have been closed from the public for various reasons, presumably because they would cause people or organizations involved in the case much embarrassment. This was no exception, and I bring it up because it reminds me of the privilege and oppression that divide the haves and the have nots--the ulgy truth that was revealed by Katrina.

In the rape case, it was a clear case of rape; however, because YouthCare was well-connected with important people on the board, a decision was made to blame the 13-year-old, saying she was partially responsible, even though the caregiver had a criminal background which had never been checked, and the evidence showed it was not consensual. The whole thing was a travesty, and I can't help but think that if this had happened to a rich, pretty white girl, it first of all would have been all over the newspapers, and second of all, the lawsuit would have been for millions. Clearly, our society values certain people over others.

Here is an excellent article entitled "What Katrina Teaches Us About Racism"

http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Gilman/

A wonderful weekend in Minneapolis

2006-07-24T09:07:00.000-07:00

I just spent a wonderful weekend with great people in Minneapolis. All of us were in the diversity field--some of us seasoned diversity consultants and others less experienced but eager to learn more.

Being in Minneapolis with like-minded, creative people reconfirmed for me that I'm doing what I was always meant to do. Like one of the people said, "We're so lucky that we GET to do this work!" Amen to that!

Asian Pacific Islander Community Leadership Foundation

2006-05-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

On May 25th, I will be facilitating a workshop on Communication and Conflict Resolution for the Asian Pacific Islander Community Leadership Foundation (ACLF). ACLF was organized in 1998 in response to a growing concern about the need to identify, train, and mentor community members for future leadership. They provide an environment that fosters the development of individual leadership, community strength and inter-community unity to promote issues critical to Asians and Pacific Islanders (APIs). They accomplish this through leadership training, community service, and mentorship.

Comments on so-called "Reverse Racism"

2006-02-03T11:03:00.000-08:00

I received an email containing an article which comments about Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans, and accusations that were leveled at him regarding his recent description of New Orleans as a "Chocolate City." This article really points out the disparity in perspective on race between whites and people of color.

Chocolate City?
By Tim Wise

ZNet Commentary, January 30, 2006

If you're looking to understand why discussions between blacks and whites about racism are often so difficult in this country, you need only know this: when the subject is race and racism, whites and blacks are often not talking about the same thing. To white folks, racism is seen mostly as individual and interpersonal--as with the uttering of a prejudicial remark or bigoted slur. For blacks, it is that too, but typically more: namely, it is the pattern and practice of policies and social institutions, which have the effect of perpetuating deeply embedded structural inequalities between people on the basis of race. To blacks, and most folks of color, racism is systemic. To whites, it is purely personal.

These differences in perception make sense, of course. After all, whites have not been the targets of systemic racism in this country, so it is much easier for us to view the matter in personal terms. If we have ever been targeted for our race, it has been only on that individual, albeit regrettable, level.

But for people of color, racism has long been experienced as an institutional phenomenon. It is the experience of systematized discrimination in housing, employment, schools or the justice system. It is the knowledge that one's entire group is under suspicion, at risk of being treated negatively because of stereotypes held by persons with the power to act on the basis of those beliefs (and the incentive to do so, as a way to retain their own disproportionate share of that power and authority).
The differences in white and black perceptions of the issue were on full display recently, when whites accused New Orleans' Mayor Ray Nagin of racism for saying that New Orleans should be and would be a "chocolate city" again, after blacks dislocated by Katrina had a chance to return. To one commentator after the other -- most of them white, but a few blacks as well -- the remark was by definition racist, since it seemed to imply that whites weren't wanted, or at least not if it meant changing the demographics of the city from mostly African American (which it was before the storm) to mostly white, which it is now, pending the return of black folks.

To prove how racist the comment was, critics offered an analogy. What would we call it, they asked, if a white politician announced that their town would or should be a "vanilla" city, meaning that it was going to retain its white majority? Since we would most certainly call such a remark racist in the case of the white pol, consistency requires that we call Nagin's remark racist as well.
Seems logical enough, only it's not. And the reason it's not goes to the very heart of what racism is and what it isn't--and the way in which the different perceptions between whites and blacks on the matter continue to thwart rational conversations on the subject.

Before dealing with the white politician/vanilla city analogy, let's quickly examine a few simple reasons why Nagin's remarks fail the test of racism. First, there is nothing to suggest that his comment about New Orleans retaining its black majority portended a dislike of whites, let alone plans to keep them out. In fact, if we simply examine Nagin's own personal history -- which has been obscured by many on the right since Katrina who have tried to charge him with being a liberal black Democrat -- we would immediately recognize the absurdity of the charge. Nagin owes his political career not to New Orleans' blacks, but New Orleans' white folks. It was whites who voted for him, at a rate of nearly ninety percent, while blacks only supported him at a rate of forty-two percent, preferring instead the city's chief of police (which itself says something: black folks in a city with a history of police brutality preferring the cop to this guy).

Nagin has always been, in the eyes of most black New Orleanians, pretty vanilla: he was a corporate vice-President, a supporter of President Bush, and a lifelong Republican prior to changing parties right before the Mayoral race.

Secondly, given the ways in which displaced blacks especially have been struggling to return -- getting the run-around with insurance payments, or dealing with landlords seeking to evict them (or jacking up rents to a point where they can't afford to return) -- one can safely intuit that all Nagin was doing was trying to reassure folks that they were wanted back and wouldn't be prevented from re-entering the city.

And finally, Nagin's remarks were less about demography per se, than an attempt to speak to the cultural heritage of the town, and the desire to retain the African and Afro-Caribbean flavor of one of the world's most celebrated cities. Fact is, culturally speaking, New Orleans is what New Orleans is, because of the chocolate to which Nagin referred. True enough, many others have contributed to the unique gumbo that is New Orleans, but can anyone seriously doubt that the predominant flavor in that gumbo has been that inspired by the city's black community? If so, then you've never lived there or spent much time in the city (and no, pissing on the street during Mardi Gras or drinking a badly-made Hurricane at Pat O'Brian's doesn't count).

If the city loses its black cultural core (which is not out of the question if the black majority doesn't or is unable to return), then indeed New Orleans itself will cease to exist, as we know it. That is surely what Nagin was saying, and it is simply impossible to think that mentioning the black cultural core of the city and demanding that it will and should be retained is racist: doing so fits no definition of racism anywhere, in any dictionary, on the planet.

As for the analogy with a white leader demanding the retention of a vanilla majority in his town, the two scenarios are not even remotely similar, precisely because of how racism has operated, historically, and today, to determine who lives where and who doesn't. For a white politician to demand that his or her city was going to remain, in effect, white, would be quite different, and far worse than what Nagin said. After all, when cities, suburbs or towns are overwhelmingly white, there are reasons (both historic and contemporary) having to do with discrimination and unequal access for people of color. Restrictive covenants, redlining by banks, racially-restrictive homesteading rights, and even policies prohibiting people of color from living in an area altogether -- four things that whites have never experienced anywhere in this nation (as whites) -- were commonly deployed against black and brown folks throughout our history. James Loewen's newest book, Sundown Towns, tells the story of hundreds of these efforts in communities across the nation, and makes clear that vanilla suburbs and towns have become so deliberately.

On the other hand, chocolate cities have not developed because whites have been barred or even discouraged from entry (indeed, cities often bend over backwards to encourage whites to move to the cities in the name of economic revival), but rather, because whites long ago fled in order to get away from black people. In fact, this white flight was directly subsidized by the government, which spent billions of dollars on highway construction (which helped whites get from work in the cities to homes in the 'burbs) and low-cost loans, essentially available only to whites in those newly developing residential spaces. The blackness of the cities increased as a direct result of the institutionally racist policies of the government, in concert with private sector discrimination, which kept folks of color locked in crowded urban spaces, even as whites could come and go as they pleased.

So for a politician to suggest that a previously brown city should remain majority "chocolate" is merely to demand that those who had always been willing to stay and make the town their home, should be able to remain there and not be run off in the name of gentrification, commercial development or urban renewal. It is to demand the eradication of barriers for those blacks who otherwise might have a hard time returning, not to call for the erection of barriers to whites--barriers that have never existed in the first place, and which there would be no power to impose in any event (quite unlike the barriers that have been set up to block access for the black and brown).
In short, to call for a vanilla majority is to call for the perpetuation of obstacles to persons of color, while to call for a chocolate majority in a place such as New Orleans is to call merely for the continuation of access and the opportunity for black folks to live there. Is that too much to ask?

Funny how Nagin's comments simply calling for the retention of a chocolate New Orleans bring down calls of racism upon his head, while the very real and active planning of the city's white elite -- people like Joe Cannizaro and Jimmy Reiss -- to actually change it to a majority white town, elicits no attention or condemnation whatsoever from white folks. In other words, talking about blacks being able to come back and make up the majority is racist, while actually engaging in ethnic cleansing -- by demolishing black neighborhoods like the lower ninth ward, the Treme, or New Orleans East as many want to do -- is seen as legitimate economic development policy.

It's also interesting that whites chose the "chocolate city" part of Nagin's speech, delivered on MLK day, as the portion deserving condemnation as racist, rather than the next part--the part in which Nagin said that Katrina was God's wrath, brought on by the sinful ways of black folks, what with their crime rates, out-of-wedlock childbirths and general wickedness.

In other words, if Nagin casts aspersions upon blacks as a group -- truth be told, the textbook definition of racism -- whites have no problem with that. Hell, most whites agree with those kinds of anti-black views, according to polling and survey data. But if Nagin suggests that those same blacks -- including, presumably the "wicked" ones -- be allowed to come back and live in New Orleans, thereby maintaining a black majority, that becomes the problem for whites, for reasons that are as self-evident as they are (and will remain) undiscussed.

Until white folks get as upset about racism actually limiting the life choices and chances of people of color, as we do about black folks hurting our feelings, it's unlikely things will get much better. In the end, it's hard to take seriously those who fume against this so-called reverse racism, so petty is the complaint, and so thin the ivory skin of those who issue it.

Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull, 2005) and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge, 2005). He can be reached at timjwise@msn.com

Weighing In On "The Apprentice"

2005-12-16T09:36:00.000-08:00

I have been a huge fan of "The Apprentice" since Season One. I tune in every Thursday to watch the contestants complete their tasks and I love watching the drama unfold in the apartment and in the boardroom. There's always someone you love to hate and someone you're rooting for to take it all. This season, it seemed from the beginning that Randal Pinkett, an African-American male, was poised from the beginning to be the big winner. He was a natural leader, he won all three tasks that he managed, and when teams were asked to bring a contestant over from another team, Randal was always the top choice. In addition, he has five degrees, including degrees from Oxford and M.I.T. He has a Ph.D. and is a Rhodes Scholar. He owns a multi-million dollar consulting firm and is a charismatic public speaker. And he's NICE. Every other contestant, with the exception of Toral, felt Randal should be the winner.

Randal's competition was Rebecca Jarvis, a 23-year-old financial journalist from Chicago. While intelligent and tough, she was certainly no match for Randal. Furthermore, her record as a project manager was 1 win and 2 losses. And during the final task, not only did she not raise any money for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, she completely lost sight of the fact that the CHARITY was her client, not Yahoo. So she tried to appease Yahoo, and in doing so, did not raise any money that evening for the charity. She also did not go out to meet Trump when he arrived in his limo (Randal did go out to meet Trump when he arrived in his helicopter). She made some huge mistakes.

So Trump hired Randal, which was the obvious choice; HOWEVER, after he hired Randal he did something that was unforgivable, in my estimation. He asked Randal if he felt he should hire Rebecca too! He completely put Randal on the spot, and basically gave Randal the power to make that decision. I applaud Randal's decision--he said that there was ONE Apprentice, and that while he respected Rebecca's talent, he felt there was one job.

This has caused much division and uproar. Some people immediately have jumped to the conclusion that Randal was selfish and arrogant not to share his victory with Rebecca, and by doing so, he would have lost nothing. Others feel that he did the right thing, and that Trump should have never put Randal in that position in the first place, and that if the tables were turned, and Randal were white and Rebecca were black, this would not have happened.

I happen to agree with the second camp. Randal was by far a superior candidate to Rebecca. It was obvious to almost every contestant and if one were to look back at previous seasons, Trump has NEVER asked the Apprentice to share his/her victory, and in both Seasons One and Two, the runners-up were much more highly qualified than Rebecca. Kwame Jackson from Season One was a Harvard graduate with an impeccable resume. Yes, he made some mistakes on his final task, but so did Rebecca. Jennifer from Season Two was an accomplished attorney and very well-spoken, and she lost because her record as a Project Manager was not as good as Kelly's, just as Rebecca's record was not as good as Randal's perfect record. (Season Three there was no contest--Kendra was clearly superior to Tana.) So now we're in Season Four and we have a highly capable, highly educated, extremely experienced African-American male who can run circles around a young, white female, and he's put in the position of asking to SHARE his victory? Something is very wrong here.

I strongly believe that what happened here reflects the fact that people of color have to be 10 times as good just to get to the same place as a white person. It also reflects the real existence of white privilege. I do not for one minute believe that if Rebecca were a woman of color and had made the same mistakes that she made in the final task that Trump would be offering her the Apprenticeship alongside Randal. And judging from many of the posts I've read about this, many people of color, who have lived through this type of experience, agree with me.

I do not know what Donald Trump's intent was or what prompted him to do what he did. But it was irresponsible and just did more to further the racial animosity that exists in our society. He clearly felt Randal was the best--he should have left it at that.

There was a post that I'd like to share that clearly encapsulated how I believe many people of color feel about this issue:

"If you have never walked in a black man's shoes NEVER talk to us about using the "Race Card". It still is difficult being black in this country and Randall should have been left with the spotlight. I do not think it should be shame on Randall it should be shame on Trump for even putting him in that position. Each apprentice works hard for that one coveted position and I do not expect that to be asked of anyone who wins. And surprise it wasn’t asked of anyone until Randall. In the past I felt the last two candidates were even more equally matched. Closer than a Rhodes Scholar that is part owner of a multi million dollar company and several degrees and a 23 year old journalist with very good accomplishments but none that come close to matching Randall. Not use the race card? We as blacks in this country know that you have to be at least 10 times better to get the same position as a white person. Hence, Rhodes Scholar, 5 degrees including one from Oxford and one from MIT and thus being asked to share the spotlight with 2 degrees from the University of Chicago. Both impressive but be real one truly outshines the other. It was and will always be an insult that Trump even asked Randall that question. That should have never been in the first place. See it without color. Try being black for a day you would be shocked by what you perceive and what is reality in our world! No racism is NOT over and do not say so unless you have been black for at least a day. It’s a totally different world for us. "

A Surprise in My Mailbox

2005-09-28T18:22:00.000-07:00

Although I LOVE the work I do, it has its challenges. There are people who just don't believe this training is necessary. They feel that we should all see ourselves as the same, as if that will fix all of society's woes, as if pretending that we're all treated equitably and and if we hold hands and sing "Kumbaya" everything will be okay. (It's called "minimization".) There are those who see "multiculturalism" as an evil word, and see those of us who teach multiculturalism as the devil reincarnated.

So these people sit in class and act out. They are passive-aggressive. When we ask what their expectations are for the day, they say they expect that they are not going to have to go through this training every year. Some read the newspaper through the entire training. They challenge everything we say. One student of mine in a college class I teach even filed a formal complaint against me and threatened legal action against the college.

So when my faith is tested, I will turn to the card I received in the mail today from Dr. Cap Peck, the Director of Teacher Education at the University of Washington. It was addressed to him from Robin, one of my former students in my "Multiculturalism and Anti-Bias in Early Childhood Education" class at Green River Community College. The Masters in Teaching program requires that all incoming students take a class that fulfills an "Education of an Ethnic Group" requirement. Because she had taught English as a Second Language in Japan, she had petitioned to have the requirement waived; however, her petition for a waiver was denied. So she wound up taking my class. In her card she writes to Dr. Peck, "I'm writing now to thank you as it turned out to be one of the best courses I've taken in my college career...You are probably not able to advocate for one teacher, or one class over another, but I hope the TEP people will continue suggesting this class--taught by Meg Tapucol-Provo--as one way of fulfilling the requirement--I think everyone in the class came away with a greater awareness of their own personal biases (however uncomfortable that may be) and an awareness of our cultural biases. A truly great class. I feel as though I see the world through a different lens now."

That was just a small excerpt of what she said, but suffice it to say, it makes this work really worth it to know that I've affected people in that way. I was so fortunate to have a summer quarter in which everyone was so open-minded and willing to view things from perspectives other than their own. Thanks Robin, you were a great student, and I know you'll be a great teacher someday too.

A Surprising Response to the Dr. Phil Show

2005-09-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, September 22nd, the Dr. Phil Show focused on the theme of racism. I was pleased, because rarely do you see this topic addressed in the mainstream media. He interviewed a racist white man whose daughter was pregnant and expecting a biracial child. He spoke with an African-American man who was accused of acting "too white". And he interviewed an African-American woman whose daughter has been missing since 1999, and discussed at length the "pretty white girl" syndrome, in which young, attractive, middle-class white girls who go missing are covered at length in the media while there is no coverage of young women of color (think Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy, Natalie Holloway).

I felt this was an excellent show that tackled a sensitive topic with candor. I'm glad that finally someone talked about the things that our society is so loathe to talk about. I wanted to post something on the Dr. Phil discussion board, but when I went there, I was shocked to see numerous posts of this ilk:

NO I AM NOT A RACIST

I TRUELY BELIEVE BLACKS ARE RACIST TRUELY. I HAVE NEVER SEEN SO MANY BLACKS ATTACK WHITES .WHITES LOST EVERYTHING THEY HAD AND THEY DIED IN THE HURRICANE AS WELL AS BLACKS. DO BLACKS NOT REALIZE WHITES SUFFER TO. ALOT OF WHITES ARE AS POOR AND IN NEED AS THEY ARE. AND TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH BLACKS GET ALOT MORE BENIFITS FROM THE GOVERMENT AND STATES THEN POOR WHITES. I WOULD LOVE FOR DR. PHIL TO TALK ABOUT POOR WHITES AND SHOW THAT WHITES SUFFER TO. IT IS NOT FAIR TO SHOW ONLY BLACKS WHO ARE POOR . SHOW THE WHITES TO.GRANDMAFUZ

This is but one example. Each post that echoed this sentiment would start off with "I'm not a racist, but..." Frankly, these people just don't get it. It was as if the entire message the show was trying to convey went in one ear and out the other. But what's scary is that I wonder how many people truly feel that way. I can sit here and think to myself, well she's just an uneducated person who can't even spell, what does she know? But I'm not that naive that I don't know that there are a LOT of educated people who also think these thoughts--and they just put a more politically correct, educated spin on it. It's scary to me to think, am I in the minority in my way of thinking? Do most people in the United States share the same sentiments as Grandmafuz? Am I out of touch because I surround myself with those who think like me?

Then there were the posts (written much more articulately, I must say, and not in all caps) which were in response to these ridiculous diatribes. Many of them would call them on the carpet and basically tell them that by virtue of the fact that they wrote what they wrote, they were racist.

I was at a party a couple of weeks ago and an acquaintance who I hadn't seen in a while asked me what I'd been up to. I told him I was still doing cultural competency training. He responded, "We're still doing that shit?" At first I was taken aback by his response, but I think he meant that here it is 2005 and we still need training on how to get along with people who are different than us.

Judging from the posts on Dr. Phil's discussion board, we have a long, long way to go.

The Different Faces of Racism

2005-09-16T09:13:00.000-07:00

I was watching an interview of former President Bill Clinton this morning on The Today Show. He was asked by Matt Lauer whether he felt the response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans would have been different if the people in the Convention Center had been middle-class and white as opposed to poor and African-American. I thought his answer was excellent--I have always felt that he has a much better understanding of racial issues than the people in the current administration, who try to dismiss any connection to race. What he said was that although he did not feel that there was any conscious racism in terms of how the government responded, he did feel that in terms of being prepared, the people in charge really were not attuned to the needs of those who were disenfranchised, and that in any disaster preparedness plan, you need to take into account things like, "How are people going to get out of the city if they don't have transportation?" What he was talking about, in essence, was institutionalized racism. What we saw, in living color, were the effects of institutionalized racism.

Barack Obama characterizes the federal response to Katrina as a "continuation of passive indifference," stating that it reflects the unthinking assumption that all Americans have "the capacity to load up their family in an SUV, fill it up with $100 worth of gasoline, stick some bottled water in the trunk and use a credit card to check into a hotel on safe ground."

However, every day, I receive something in my email inbox of acts of individual racism that happened in New Orleans as well. Blatant, out and out, in your face racism. Here is yet another story from someone who survived, a lawyer named Peter Berkowitz who happened to be in New Orleans when the hurricane hit.

http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/3405/

And this week's issue of Newsweek reported this disturbing scene:

"Over the course of two days, a white river-taxi operator from hard-hit St. Bernard Parish rescued scores of people from flooded areas and ferried them to safety. All were white. 'A n--ger is a n--ger is a n--ger.' he told a Newseek reporter. Then he said it again."

Yet people are still saying race isn't an issue.

Although I didn't watch Bush's entire speech last night, apparently he did acknowledge that what happened in New Orleans exposed some ugly truths about the racial and class divide that is rooted in racial discrimination in this country. Now that he's acknowledged it, let's see what he's planning to do about it. I'm also curious to see what the right-wing pundits, who throughout the past couple weeks have insisted that race has nothing to do with it, are going to say now.

10 Great Ways You Can Help

2005-09-14T12:18:00.000-07:00

I just received an email with a link to this site and thought I'd pass this on--great information about alternative ways of helping hurricane survivors...

http://www.alternet.org/story/25177

Survivors' Stories

2005-09-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

It seems that the mainstream media is misrepresenting what really happened in New Orleans. NPR interviewed several Hurricane Katrina survivors--a woman who was at the convention center, two people who tell how armed police in Gretna actually prevented them from leaving New Orleans in the height of the crisis, and a teenager who talks about what it is like to go without water for two days.

http://www.thislife.org/ The story is titled "After the Flood".

In addition, here is the written first-person account of two paramedics, Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, attending a convention in New Orleans who were trapped by Hurricane Katrina. These are the two people who were interviewed in "After the Flood" who were prevented from leaving New Orleans.

*************************************************

Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreen's store at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing. The milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat. The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers, and prescriptions and fled the City. Outside Walgreen's windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry.

The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized and the windows at Walgreen's gave way to the looters. There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices, and bottle water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.
We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days ago and arrived home yesterday (Saturday). We have yet to see any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreen's in the French Quarter.

We also suspect the media will have been inundated with "hero" images of the National Guard, the troops and the police struggling to help the "victims" of the Hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed, were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators.

Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded. Most of these workers had lost their homes, and had not heard from members of their families, yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20% of New Orleans that was not under water.

On Day 2, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves, and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina. Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources including the National Guard and scores of buses were pouring in to the City. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible because none of us had seen them.

We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the "imminent" arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute they arrived at the City limits, they were commandeered by the military.

By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the "officials" told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City's primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. The guards further told us that the City's only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, "If we can't go to the only 2 shelters in the City, what was our alternative?" The guards told us that that was our problem, and no they did not have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile "law enforcement".

We walked to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told the same thing, that we were on our own, and no they did not have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and would constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City officials. The police told us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the City. The crowd cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation and wrong information and was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, "I swear to you that the buses are there."

We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched past the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.

Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet to be seen buses.

All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot.

Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become.

Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts. Now secure with the two necessities, food and water; cooperation, community, and creativity flowered. We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps. We even organized a food recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).

This was a process we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself only. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. When these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.

If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in. Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people. >From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, "Get off the fucking freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water. Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims" they saw "mob" or "riot". We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together" was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.
The next days, our group of 8 walked most of the day, made contact with New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search and rescue team. We were dropped off near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned.

We arrived at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The airport had become another Superdome. We 8 were caught in a press of humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush landed briefly at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated on a coast guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio, Texas.

There the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief effort continued. We were placed on buses and driven to a large field where we were forced to sit for hours and hours. Some of the buses did not have air-conditioners. In the dark, hundreds if us were forced to share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those who managed to make it out with any possessions (often a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) we were subjected to two different dog-sniffing searches.

Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations had been confiscated at the airport because the rations set off the metal detectors. Yet, no food had been provided to the men, women, children, elderly, disabled as they sat for hours waiting to be "medically screened" to make sure we were not carrying any communicable diseases.

This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heart-felt reception given to us by the ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome. Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept, and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.

Who Are the Real Criminals?

2005-09-09T09:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my husband told me of yet another comment he heard at his workplace that all the looters should be shot, regardless of whether they were stealing TV sets or taking food and water for survival. My husband spoke out vehemently against this hateful rhetoric and has vowed that he will not sit by silently while people spew forth venom such as this. Something I talk about in the class I teach, "Multiculturalism and Anti-Bias in Education" at Green River Community College, is that if we are not part of the solution then we are part of the problem. If we do not speak up when people make racist or otherwise bigoted or prejudicial remarks, or engage in racist or bigoted behavior, then they perceive us to be in tacit agreement with them. And nothing changes.

But that isn't what I want to talk about today. It has just been revealed that Michael Brown, the blithering idiot that heads up FEMA, padded his resume. According to the latest Time Magazine investigative report, Brown had no management training. In addition, other top FEMA officials had no background other than public relations. All of their political appointments were based on personal friendships.

Brown's White House biography stated that he was the Assistant City Manager of Edmond, Oklahoma from 1975 to 1978 with oversight of the Emergency Services Division. However, when Time Magazine interviewed officials of Edmond, they discovered that Brown was actually Assistant to the City Manager, an administrative position that is on par with an intern.

So we have someone completely incompetent as our HURRICANE CZAR?????? And others equally as incompetent in top positions at FEMA????? What is the larger crime here? Stealing TVs and food and water? Or lying on your resume to get a job where millions of lives are at stake, and who knows how many lives were lost because of your lack of experience and utter incompetence? And the cronyism that exists at the highest levels of government that allowed that lack of experience to be overlooked in favor of personal friendships?

Unbelievable.

The Myth of Meritocracy

2005-09-05T16:37:00.000-07:00

When I read about Michael Brown, the inept head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) who has completely botched the federal disaster management response to Hurricane Katrina, and that his prior experience was running something called the International Arabian Horse Association, and that his appointment was based on a personal connection, I cannot help thinking about how this scenario is played out over and over again in our society.

I teach a class entitled "Multiculturalism and Anti-Bias in Education" at Green River Community College. During our final class meeting of the summer quarter, we had a lively discussion about affirmative action. One of my students was firmly opposed to affirmative action, saying she felt that people of color who were less qualified were getting into colleges and getting jobs over more qualified white people. (Never mind that there was not one person of color in my entire class, except for me.) So I posed the question, "Isn't it a form of affirmative action when a white male whose father is an alumnus of an Ivy League school, automatically is accepted into the school, even if his grades are marginal? Isn't that a form of preferential treatment? Why aren't people clamoring to get rid of that?"

According to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Brown "admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center." Yet instead of taking him to task, Bush hailed him in Mobile, Alabama on Friday by saying, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." So not only does he get the job because of preferential treatment, when he screws up, he gets a pat on the back.

Peggy McIntosh of Wellesley College wrote an excellent article about white privilege entitled "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack", that many of us in the field of intercultural communications use in our work. Here is the link:

http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html

It is because of white privilege that many whites and people of color view the political fallout of Hurricane Katrina through very different lenses. According to McIntosh,

"The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these subjects taboo."

Many whites will say that race was not an issue, whereas people of color will say that race was absolutely an issue.

White privilege is what got Michael Brown his job. If Michael Brown had been an African-American heading up the International Arabian Horse Association, with no prior experience with emergency management, he would never have had the connections, or been part of the good old boy network to get the job heading up FEMA. The appointment of Michael Brown goes to show that meritocracy is a myth. Society teaches us that if we work hard, we will get what we want, but white privilege puts certain people at an advantage while putting others at a disadvantage. As McIntosh writes,

"...obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already."

Wise Words from Leonard Pitts, Jr.

2005-09-04T09:51:00.000-07:00

Two nights ago, my husband shared something with me that had happened earlier that morning. A business acquaintance of his was talking about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and started spouting hateful invectives--"Those n____rs deserved it! They were looting and out of control!" On and on and on. Because I'd met this person before and had detected racist attitudes in him, I was not completely surprised, although both my husband and I wondered out loud how the seeds of such venom and hate had been planted in this man's mind.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., my favorite editorial columnist from the Miami Herald, wrote a great column today entitled "Don't Use Katrina to Justify Your Hate" that addresses this issue. In it he writes, "It's as tiresome as it is predictable. American disunion being what it is these days, some of us look at even a natural disaster through the distorting prism of bigotry, rancor and fear."

I'd like to share the article with you because I think he has some important things to say:

Don't use Katrina to justify your hate
Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Does it really matter?

The city is flooded, people are homeless and hungry and scared and dead. Shouldn't this be a time for giving money and saying prayers? Should we really care about the color of the people looting in the hurricane zone? Or that Louisiana is a red state? Or that some of the dead are gay?

Apparently, that kind of thing matters to some of us.

It matters, for instance, to a black man who posted a note in an online forum saying he is embarrassed by news footage showing that most of the looters are black.

It matters to the white people who've sent me notes daring me to explain why blacks are "running amok."

It matters to the author of a note circulating on the Internet who says it would be a "problem" for a liberal in a blue state to send relief money to a red state.

And it matters to a group called Repent America, which has issued a statement saying the storm was God's way of canceling a gay festival that was to have taken place in New Orleans this week.

It's as tiresome as it is predictable. American disunion being what it is these days, some of us look at even a natural disaster through the distorting prism of bigotry, rancor and fear.

Let me say a few things here. The first is that the city of New Orleans is, according to the last census, 67.3 percent black. Given that looting is predictable under any significant breakdown of social order, whom would you expect to find out there smashing windows when the lights go out? Ethnic Hawaiians?

Besides which, white folks loot, too. Only it's not called looting when they do it. I refer you to a widely circulated news photo of a white couple wading through chest-high water after, in the words of the caption, "finding" food. As if that loaf of bread the woman has were just lying by the side of the road.

I'm sorry, but I have little patience for black people who find shame in this looting. Less patience for white ones who find vindication of their bigotry. It makes me angry that some people think these are the conversations we should be having now.

Our countrymen are in dire straits. We are talking in large part about those who had no means of escape, no cars or credit cards, no way to book a flight, reserve a room, buy a bus ticket, hop a train, no choice but to sit there and wait for disaster to come.

They are, by and large, the poorest and most meager among us and they are living through hell right now. Death toll rising like floodwaters, probably heading into the thousands, corpses floating down the street, and some liberal twit is joking — God, I hope he was joking — that the blue states should let the red one suffer? People clinging to roof tops, a great city turned into a steaming, stinking primordial swamp, and some alleged Christians think it's a victory for heterosexuality?

Memo to all these nitwits: It was a hurricane, not God's stamp of approval for your small-mindedness and hate.

Tragedy often becomes a stage for the best of human character. But it seems as if this tragedy is also destined to be a stage for the worst, a spotlight on the divisions that have lately grown so much wider between us.

And then there is the TV reporter who met a distraught man in the aftermath of the storm. He told her how his house had broken in two. How he tried to hold onto his wife as the storm and the water raged. How she told him, "You can't hold me" and asked him to take care of the kids and the grandkids. How he lost his grip and she was swept away.

The man was crying as he told the story and it seemed as if the reporter was weeping, too. For the record, he was black and she was white and I wouldn't be surprised if there were also other differences between them. But in that moment, they were just two human beings met at an intersection of inconsolable loss.

There are times when nothing else matters.

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.'s column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: lpitts@herald.com

A National Disgrace

2005-09-02T11:31:00.000-07:00

As I watch the heartbreaking images of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I am extremely disturbed at what I see. If people want a rude awakening about the state of the racial divide in our country, just turn on the television. There are those who will say that there is not a racial issue anymore in this country, and it's all about class. However, one cannot deny the fact that race and class are inextricably intertwined. Look at the people in New Orleans, stuck in the Convention Center without food and water. 99% of them are poor and African-American. These are the people who have no way to get out of the city, no car and no money. As I watched the Dateline Special last night, the racial divide was glaring. White people with cars were fleeing New Orleans, sitting in long gas lines, trying to find a motel. Other white people holed up on a rooftop of a vacant apartment building, afraid of the violence on the streets. And tens of thousands of African-American people (with a smattering of a few white faces) in the New Orleans Convention Center, with no food, no water, surrounded by the dead and the dying, forgotten by the powers that be. Is this really America? Sadly, yes.

Martin Espada, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts says, "We tend to think of natural disasters as somehow even-handed, as somehow random. Yet it has always been thus: poor people are in danger. That is what it means to be poor. It's dangerous to be poor. It's dangerous to be black. It's dangerous to be Latino."

And Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta had this to say: "Everything is God's will. But there's a certain amount of common sense that God gives to individuals to prepare for certain things. Most of the people that live in the neighborhoods that were most vulnerable are black and poor. So it comes down to a lack of sensitivity on the part of people in Washington that you need to help poor folks. It's as simple as that."

Patti Digh, a colleague of mine at Executive Diversity Services, wrote a moving piece about just this issue on her weblog, 37 Days. In it she talks about the intersection of race and class, how white privilege and socioeconomic privilege make people oblivious to the fault lines that divide people, and how Hurricane Katrina is bringing it all to the forefront. Here's the piece:

http://37days.typepad.com/37days/2005/09/replace_they_wi.html

As Patti writes in her piece, if the people in the Convention Center were wealthy and influential, would they be sitting there for five days dying in the sun, waiting for food and water? Of course not. But the people there now are those in the margins. They are not looked at as individuals, but as a mob. Without resources and without connections. Forgotten. The response to the tsunami victims in Asia was quicker than the response to our own citizens. It's unconscionable and an unspeakable tragedy.