Like many of you, I was shocked and hurt to hear of the death of Michael Jackson.
He was an entertainment superstar, and a defining figure of my generation.
He was perhaps the ultimate black “crossover” figure. His Thriller album is the best selling album of all time, with over 100 million copies sold worldwide.
It is amazing to think that a black kid in a soul music kiddie band from Gary, Indiana could grow up and achieve such commercial music heights. Only in America.
Sadly, Jackson will be remembered as much for his eccentricity as his talent. A little while ago, I wrote a post about a play that featured the story of a tragic mulatto.
And that popped into my head when I thought of Jackson. Jackson had facial surgery numerous times, resulting in a face that lacked blackness, and common sense. The brown skinned, afro coiffed, and chubby-cherub face of his early career was replaced by a very light skinned, almost ghostly caricature.
And so, a man who was rich enough to have anything used his wealth to destroy that which made him famous: his own image.
Still, none of that diminished his talent or impact. Michael Jackson’s music was pop and R’n'B at its best. His stuff sounds good, even today; it stands the test of time, and it will continue to do so.
Whatever demons drove him in his later life, I hope he is free of them now.
From Youtube, here is an ode to Michael Jackson and all the black performers who paved the way for him.
There’s been a rash of politicians-mainly Southern, always Republican-who have made comments to the effect that their states should secede from the United States. Given that these statements are being made a time when we have an African American President, the symbolism of this rhetoric is extremely disturbing.
General David Poythress is a Democratic candidate for Governor of Georgia. He has this to say about politicians who would “cut and run from America”:
This is some text from the clip:
For years, Georgia’s 8th Grade students read in their history books about our state’s decision to secede from the United States back in 1861. Today, our students need only look at a daily newspaper to see that talk of secession isn’t just a thing of the past. In fact, four of the six Republican candidates said they would support Georgia seceding from the United States of America. This is outrageous.
This is absolutely disgraceful—it’s a slap in the face to every patriotic American, to anybody who has served under the American flag and to those brave Georgians who have fought and died for our country in Iraq…
What really offends me the most, is that none of these Republican secession candidates ever wore, for a single day, the uniform of our country, carried a weapon, or heard a shot fired in anger. Not ONE ever put their life on the line to protect our freedoms and liberty.
But they recklessly call for secession from America. They would in effect, ban the American flag and end the pledge of allegiance. They would say to the world that when they don’t get their way, they quit.
That’s just childish. That’s cowardice, not leadership… Real leadership means we work toward common sense solutions to protect American values, not just quit our country because we don’t agree with other Americans… United We Stand. Divided We Fall… Know this: when I’m the Governor of Georgia, I won’t cut and run from America… When I say the Pledge of Allegiance, I mean it.
I don’t know much else about the General, and let me make it clear, I am not promoting his candidacy. But this is an important and timely message, and I felt strongly that I should help to spread it.
In a related note: earlier this week, I attended a Juneteenth celebration that was held at the main library here in Washington, DC. During the event, one of the speakers asked everyone to rise and say the Pledge of Allegiance.
Most of the people in the almost all-African American audience stood and said the pledge. But there was a bunch of people who did not.
I was troubled by this. Yes, this country has committed its share of offenses. Certainly, slavery and Jim Crow are evils that will forever stain the American legacy.
But darn it, this is our country too. During the Civil War, some 200,000 African Americans served in the Union forces. Many of them died in the cause of our freedom, a freedom that all black Americans enjoy today… and that many black Americans, sadly and unfortunately, squander.
My uncle served in World War II. He was a part of General Patton’s black tank unit. He took pride in showing me a Nazi swastika that he captured from German soldiers. And I took pride in hearing of his accomplishments.
Bottom line, we fought for this country, we built this country, we ARE this country. America is us.
I am proud to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Not necessarily for the America that is, but for the America that I want and am willing to work hard to create. I pledge that I will make America a better place, not just for me, or my family, but for the world community.
And that’s something we should all stand for.
PS: I don’t mean to imply that folks who don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance are unpatriotic or other wise “bad.” What I am saying is, I hope that people won’t see our nation’s horrible race history as a block to saying the Pledge. I’m not saying that we should turn our back on the past, but rather, turn our faces forward to the future, and pledge to the country we want to create, not the one we had before or even the one we have now.
I want to give a hat tip to the folks at Indigo Journal for turning me on to this story.
Juneteenth (June 19) 2009 is tomorrow. Don’t forget to use this time to reflect on our history and its meaning for the future. American Flag and Juneteenth Flag
Effective January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation declared that all black slaves who lived in the Confederate states during the Civil War were “forever free.” This did not free the slaves immediately; the Confederacy simply ignored the order, and went about with their conduct of the Civil War.
Emancipation became “official” in 1865 when Confederate commander Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. The news of the war’s end and emancipation spread through the South, but it was slow in getting to Texas.
Texas, which was far and isolated from much of the fighting, had become a place of refuge for slaveholders who wanted to keep their slaves from becoming free. But on June 19, 1865, Federal troops came to Galveston, Texas, and announced that all the slaves were emancipated. These blacks in Texas are considered to be the last group of slaves to know that they were freed.
June 19th – Juneteenth – has gone from being a local day of celebration and reflection in Texas, to a national one. Here in Washington, DC, several events have been planned, including a service at the African American Civil War memorial.
This picture is from a Juneteenth celebration in 1900 at the University of Texas in Austin.
I hope you can all take some time to commemorate this vital part of history.
I guess the Republican Party just can’t help it. Making crude comments about African Americans, even one who has reached the position of POTUS, seems to be in their DNA. Consider these clumsy remarks by the Republican Party about Barack Obama and his wife Michelle:
• From Newscoma: Tennessee GOP state Senator Diane Black (R-Gallatin) sent an email with this image of our country’s presidents.
• From the Indigo Journal: Mike Green, a Republican operative who is helping to run the campaign for GOP gubernatorial candidate Gresham Barrett, posted the following joke about President Obama on his Twitter account:
JUST HEARD OBAMA IS GOING TO IMPOSE A 40% TAX ON ASPIRIN BECAUSE IT’S WHITE AND IT WORKS.
• Fitsnews.com reports: Republican Rusty DePass, a former SC State Senate candidate, supporter of former President George W. Bush, and Longtime GOP activist, made this comment after hearing about the escape of a gorilla from a zoo in Columbia South Carolina:
“I’m sure it’s just one of Michelle’s ancestors — probably harmless.
And yet they wonder why they can’t get more black votes…
The Octoroon is a tragic mulatto play by Irish playwright and actor Dion Boucicault. It opened on Broadway in 1859, just a few years before the American Civil War. The play was based on Mayne Reid’s novel, The Quadroon, and the incidents relating to the murder of the slave in Albany Fonblanque’s novel, The Filibuster.
The Tragic mulatto is a stereotypical fictional character that appeared in American literature during the 19th and 20th centuries. The “tragic mulatto” is an archetypical mixed race person (a “mulatto”), who is assumed to be sad or even suicidal because he/she fails to completely fit in the “white world” or the “black world”. As such, the “tragic mulatto” is depicted as the victim of the society he/she lives in, a society divided by race. Because of society’s reluctance to acknowledge ambiguity in racial classifications, this character is particularly vulnerable.
The “tragic mulatta” figure is a woman of biracial heritage who must endure the hardships of African-Americans in the antebellum South, even though she may look white enough that her ethnicity is not immediately obvious. As the name implies, tragic mulattas almost always meet a bad end.
Generally, the tragic mulatta archetype falls into one of three categories:
• A woman who can “pass” for white attempts to do so, is accepted as white by society and falls in love with a white man. Eventually, her status as a bi-racial person is revealed and the story ends in tragedy.
• A woman appears to be white. She has suffered little hardship in her life, but upon the revelation that she is mixed race, she loses her social standing.
• A woman who has all the social graces that come along with being a middle-class or upper-class white woman is nonetheless subjected to slavery.
The play centers around its heroine Zoe, a Louisiana octoroon in the pre-Civil War era. An octoroon is a person who has one biracial grandparent, while the other three grandparents are white. An octoroon is the child of a white parent and a quadroon parent. A quadroon is the child of a white parent and a biracial parent.
Octoroons are very often light enough to appear white. However, under the era’s one-drop rule, they were considered black. Additionally, any child born to a slave was automatically considered a slave. So, an octoroon born to a quadroon mother, where the quadroon mother was born to a biracial slave mother, was herself a slave.
Zoe lives on the Louisiana slave plantation of the late Judge Peyton and his wife, Mrs. Peyton. Due to financial problems, Mrs. Peyton is being forced to sell the plantation and its slaves. Zoe is the daughter of Judge Peyton through one of the slaves. Zoe is light enough that she appears white. Zoe was raised as, and grew-up believing, she was a freewoman, but learns during the play that she is legally a slave.
The hero of the play is George, the nephew of Mrs. Peyton, who visits the plantation after an extended stay in France. George falls in love with Zoe, and he proposes to her. However, Zoe rejects the proposition, pointing out that the law prevents a white man from marrying a “black” woman. George offers to take her to a different country, but Zoe says wishes to stay with the plantation.
The villain of the play is Jacob McClosky, a scoundrel whose under-handed dealings with the late Judge Peyton led to the plantation’s financial problems. McClosky desires Zoe for himself, but she rejects him. He plots to have her sold with the plantation and the rest of the slaves, and then buy her and make her his mistress.
Big Mama Thornton was a blues woman. And she could rock. This is from a live show in Oregon in 1971.
Willie Mae Thornton, aka Big Mama Thornton, was born on December 11, 1926 in Montgomery, Alabama. Like many black musicians, she started out singing gospel at her church. At the age of 14, she left home to join a chitlin circuit music troupe in Georgia named the Hot Harlem Revue. She went on to tour and do musical dates with a number of blues and R’n'B figures.
Her biggest hit was “Hound Dog”, which was released in 1952, along with the B side tune “They Call Me Big Mama.” The song was #1 on the Billboard R’n'B charts for seven weeks, and sold almost two million copies.
Three years later, Elvis Presley recorded his own version of the song, and it became an even bigger hit; few people today remember that Big Mama was the first to do the song.
Big Mama was not a beauty queen. And she was big, getting to as much as 350 lbs, although illness later in life made her lose her size. On the above video, she looks almost lean.
But no matter, she could still carry a tune and then some. Blessed with gravelly sounding, booming voice, Big Mama belted people with the blues. She taught herself the harmonica, and that added some depth to her performances, especially live.
She died young at the age of 57, due to heart and liver problems that many attribute to her hard drinking lifestyle.
The Department of Health and Human Services has created a website called Health Reform.gov that makes the case for change in our health care system. And I have to say: for a government-produced website, it is very well done. The layout and graphics are polished and professional, and it has a lot of interesting content.
The site includes a very good discussion of racial disparities in health care, on a page titled Health Disparities: A Case for Closing the Gap. It includes these comments on rates of disease among various American ethnic groups:
Racial and ethnic minorities have high rates of debilitating disease such as obesity, cancer, diabetes, and AIDS. One of the most glaring disparities is apparent in the African American community, where 48% of adults suffer from a chronic disease compared to 39% of the general population.
Obesity
Obesity is debilitating and is often a catalyst to chronic disease. Seven out of 10 African Americans ages 18 to 64 are obese or overweight, and African Americans are 15% more likely to suffer from obesity than Whites.
Cancer
African Americans are more likely to develop and die from cancer than any other racial or ethnic group.
African American men are 50% more likely than Whites to have prostate cancer and are more likely than any other racial group to suffer from colorectal cancer. Hispanic and Vietnamese women have disproportionate rates of cervical cancer, which they contract at twice the rate of White women.
Diabetes
Fifteen percent of African Americans, 14% of Hispanics, and 18% of American Indians suffer from adult onset diabetes. American Indians suffer from diabetes at more than twice the rate of the White population, which develops the disease at a rate of only 8%.
HIV/AIDS
HIV bears witness to the most extreme disparity in chronic disease. African Americans experience new HIV infections at seven times the rate of Whites, and Hispanics experience new HIV infections at two and a half times the rate of Whites.
There’s more at the site, and it makes for vital reading. Highly recommended.
Soul of America.com, a black travel website, has compiled a list of the Top Ten Black Museums, plus five honorable mentions. The list includes a photo of each of the top sites, plus a brief descriptive essay.
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati
The author of the list says he’s visited over 50(!) black museums, and ranked them on various factors, such as art collection, architecture, historical artifacts collection, and uniqueness of artifacts or concept. Based on those and other criteria, these are the places that made the Top Ten list:
TOP 10 BLACK MUSEUMS
American Jazz Museum & Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, Kansas City, MO
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Birmingham, AL
Charles Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, MI
Du Sable Museum of African American History, Chicago, IL
Muhammad Ali Center, Louisville, KY
National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN
National Great Blacks In Wax Museum, Baltimore, MD
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati, OH
Reginald Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, Baltimore, MD
Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, NY
Charles Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit
FIVE HONORABLE MENTIONS
Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Memphis, TN
African American Museum of Philadelphia, PA
Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, Houston, TX
African American Museum Dallas, TX
Museum Of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA
Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Memphis
I found the stories of these places to be both informative and enjoyable. Highly recommended, even if you’re not looking for travel ideas.
Mrs. Allotherpersons loves this video clip, and she insists that I put it on my blog. It’s from the Our Gang/Little Rascals series. I think it’s OK… here it is, take a look and let me add some comments.
As a child, one of my favorite shows was The Little Rascals, also known as Our Gang. As described by Wikipedia,
Our Gang/The Little Rascals… was a series of American comedy short films about the adventures of a group of poor neighborhood children. Created by comedy producer Hal Roach, Our Gang was produced… starting in 1922 as a silent short subject series. Roach changed distributors… in 1927, went to sound in 1929 and continued production until 1938, when he sold the series to MGM. MGM in turn continued producing the comedies until 1944. In the mid-1950s, the 80 Roach-produced shorts with sound were syndicated for television under the title The Little Rascals.
I started watching TV in the early 1960s. The fact that my viewing included Little Rascals shows which were made in the 1930s and 1940s is a testement to the fact that back in the ’60s, there wasn’t a lot of content on network television. (That may be why I never cease to be amazed by the hundreds of TV channels we get today on cable or satellite.)
So I watched The Little Rascals, in all their black and white glory. And I’m not just talking about the film color. The Rascals was unique, in that it featured an integrated cast, and, the black characters were not treated as ridiculous stereotypres.
My favorite character on the show who was a black kid named Stymie. He got a lot of lines, he had good comedic timing, he was a master of facial expressions even as a youngster, and he was something of a leader among his cast of characters. He was funny without being ridiculously silly. (Now Alfalfa-a white character on the show-he was ridiculously silly.)
But The Rascals did sometimes reflect the stereotypes of the day (see the above video), and that’s gotten it in trouble with people who look at the show with today’s sensibilities. As mentioned in Wikipedia,
• The American people were fiercely independent. They wanted to do things for themselves. They didn’t want the British government, which was an ocean away, telling them how to live their lives.
• A combination of harsh taxes and the lack of an American voice in the British Parliament gave rise to the famous phrase “taxation without representation.”
• Americans started stockpiling guns and ammunition in violation of British laws. Their defense of such a stockpile led to the shots fired at Lexington and Concord and the beginning of the Revolutionary War.
***
On June 22, 1772, nearly a century before the slaves were freed in America, a British judge, with a single decision, brought about the conditions that would end slavery in England. His decision would have monumental consequences in the American colonies, leading up to the American Revolution, the Civil War, and beyond. Because of that ruling, history would forever be changed. This book is about that decision and the role of slavery in the founding of the United States.
- from Slave Nation: How Slavery United The Colonies And Sparked The American Revolution, by Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen
***
“You can’t handle the truth.” - from the 1992 movie A Few Good Men
***
Truth hurts. And this might be one of the more hurtful truths an American can learn: a major reason for the Revolutionary War was the protection of slavery.
That’s not something they teach in the schools. But our history lessons might look different in the future, if more people read the book Slave Nation: How Slavery United The Colonies And Sparked The American Revolution, by Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen. (The book cover is to the left.)
The Blumrosens, former lawyers for the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice, have a background in equal employment law. Over the course of their careers, they developed an interest in the historical causes of America’s racial inequities. The result is this book, which applies a lawyer’s insight into what they show to be a disturbing aspect of American history.
The main point of their book is that the American colonists-particularly Southern colonists-were afraid that the British government would abolish slavery. And that this fear was a major reason for the colonists’ desire to break away from Great Britain.
Here’s the problem with the way the Revolutionary War is taught: much of the story about the War centers on the northern colonies, particularly Massachusetts, where pivotal events such as the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre took place, and where the term “no taxation without representation” originated. And there’s no doubt that Massachusetts was a flashpoint in the coming war of independence.
But there were 13 original colonies, and the southern colonies had a unique interest of their own to worry about: protecting their “right” to keep slaves.
Is it just me, or do the airwaves seem less… colorful… since the wrapup of the 2008 elections?
I was thinking about that when a commentary from E.J. Dionne Jr in the Washington Post, titled Rush and Newt Are Winning, caught my eye (and lots of other folks on the blogosphere as well):
A media environment that tilts to the right is obscuring what President Obama stands for and closing off political options that should be part of the public discussion.
…the media… regularly treat(s) far-right views as mainstream positions and… largely ignor(es) critiques of Obama that come from elected officials on the left.
This was brought home at this week’s annual conference of the Campaign for America’s Future, a progressive group that supports Obama but worries about how close his economic advisers are to Wall Street, how long our troops will have to stay in Afghanistan and how much he will be willing to compromise to secure health-care reform.
In other words, they see Obama not as the parody created by the far right but as he actually is: a politician with progressive values but moderate instincts who has hewed to the middle of the road in dealing with the economic crisis, health care, Guantanamo and the war in Afghanistan.
While the right wing’s rants get wall-to-wall airtime, you almost never hear from the sort of progressive members of Congress who were on an America’s Future panel on Tuesday.
A soon to be published study is confirming what many people have been saying for years: that schools seem to lose good teachers as their black population increases.
A study forthcoming in the Journal of Labor Economics suggests that high-quality teachers tend to leave schools that experience inflows of black students. According to the study’s author, C. Kirabo Jackson (Cornell University), this is the first study to show that a school’s racial makeup may have a direct impact on the quality of its teachers.
Dr. Jackson’s findings suggest that it’s not neighborhoods keeping high-quality teachers away; it’s the students—and it’s directly related to their race.
“This is particularly sobering because it implies that, all else equal, black students will systematically receive lower quality instruction,” Jackson said. “This relationship may be a substantial contributor to the black-white achievement gap in American schools.”
“This study implies teachers may prefer a student body that is more white and less black,” Jackson says.
One other disturbing finding of the study, which was done in the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school district in North Carolina after race-based busing ended there in 2002, was this:
Black teachers were slightly more likely than white teachers to stay in the schools that experienced a black inflow, the study found. However, those black teachers who did leave black schools tended to be the highest qualified black teachers. So the decline in quality was somewhat more pronounced among black teachers than white teachers.
Here’s some good news, involving a young student from South Carolina you might remember from President Obama’s State of the Union speech in February. Although it might take a few minutes to get to the “good” part.
Ty’Sheoma Bethea is an eighth grader at J.V. Martin Junior High School in Dillon, S.C. The school is in a poor area of the state, dubbed “the corridor of shame,” and doesn’t have the money to fix it’s crumbling physical plant. The middle of of the following video clip shows Barack Obama making a visit to the area in January 2008 during the election season:
Churches in Mobile, AL have joined together to develop and conduct a program on black parenting skills. WKRG.com provides details of their efforts:
“Families need help right now. We’re in a crisis”, says Mobile County Juvenile Court Judge Edmond Naman. In a meeting recently with the WKRG News 5 Crime Solutions Task Force, Judge Naman said the county is exploring new ways of reaching out to families before kids get into trouble.
But, local pastors have already implemented a curriculum the judge is very impressed with, Effective Black Parenting. It is a 15 week skill building program that teaches adults how to better communicate with African American Children.
“it’s a culture difference..where in a caucasian family it’s usually time out. But, in an African American family, it’s I’m fixing to get this belt.. and tear you behind up”, says Sherman Tate, a graduate of the Effective Black Parenting program.
The entire article and accompanying video deserve a look, especially from those of you who are looking for ideas to positively impact your communities.
Bayou, the on-line comic by writer/artist Jeremy Love of Gettosake, was a big winner at the 8th Annual East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention (ECBACC) that was held in Philadelphia on May 16th. Bayou won several Convention awards, all of them well deserved.
Scenes from Jeremy Love’s on-line (and soon to be printed) Bayou comic:
That’s not something they teach in the schools. But our history lessons might look different in the future, if more people read the book Slave Nation: How Slavery United The Colonies And Sparked The American Revolution, by Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen. (The book cover is to the left.)
