Minorities as majority

Minorities are majority population in Montgomery County, reports WashPo in today's Metro section.

As recently as 1990, seven out of 10 Maryland residents were white. Now, they are barely a majority, at 55 percent of the population.

Y'know, in a world that is what, 10 or 15 percent white, given that apart from the pitifully few who have chosen to retain identity as Native Americans everyone else in this country is an immigrant "from the rest of the world", 55 percent white population in any area of this country is still hugely disproportionate.

We may not be headed for a country full of Chocolate Cities so much as salt-n-peppa-and-spice-and-everything-nice. Watch out for the White Fear Backlash but the optimist in me believes that is temporary, once people have the chance to live closer together with "others" and just, well, get over it.

Driving While Hispanic, Being Presidential While Black

Frank Rich looks at the connections between Arizona's new "arrested for driving while Latino" law and the radical right's growing "Take Back America" campaign complete with its Birther members who would be so funny if they were not so sad and so scary. The GOP is bending over in full kowtow to the Teabaggers and I'm starting to think the overt racism of the past was less dangerous than the tide that is currently on the rise.

It's difficult, as always, to choose from among Rich's high-fidelity paragraphs a couple to quote. These were chosen sort of randomly:

It's harder and harder to cling to the conventional wisdom that the Tea Party is merely an element in the G.O.P., not the party's controlling force -- the tail that's wagging the snarling dog. It's also hard to maintain that the Tea Party's nuttier elements are merely a fringe of a fringe. The first national Tea Party convention, in Nashville in February, chose as its kickoff speaker the former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, a notorious nativist who surely was enlisted precisely because he runs around saying things like he has ''no idea where Obama was born.'' The Times/CBS poll of the Tea Party movement found that only 41 percent of its supporters believe that the president was born in the United States.

The angry right and its apologists also keep insisting that race has nothing to do with their political passions. Thus Sarah Palin explained that it's Obama and the ''lamestream media'' that are responsible for ''perpetuating this myth that racial profiling is a part'' of Arizona's law. So how does that profiling work without race or ethnicity, exactly? Brian Bilbray, a Republican Congressman from California and another supporter of the law, rode to the rescue by suggesting ''they will look at the kind of dress you wear.'' Wise Latinas better start shopping at Talbots!

Oh gosh, I can't resist adding one more paragraph:

In a development that can only be described as startling, the G.O.P.'s one visible black leader, the party chairman Michael Steele, went off message when appearing at DePaul University on April 20. He conceded that African-Americans ''really don't have a reason'' to vote Republican, citing his party's pursuit of a race-baiting ''Southern strategy'' since the Nixon-Agnew era. For this he was attacked by conservatives who denied there had ever been such a strategy. That bit of historical revisionism would require erasing, for starters, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the Willie Horton campaign that helped to propel Bush 41 into the White House in 1988.

 Frank Rich so skillfully melds his pieces. He knits and purls together his thoughts, the news, our political history, and "startling" quotes you may not have heard about before. A read of the whole rather lengthy op-ed piece is highly recommended.

Poem of the day: The Hebrew Mamita

Vanessa Hidary is one of my faves amongst the poets who appeared in the six seasons of Russ Simmons' Def Poetry series on HBO.

This performance is especially deep for me, because I have been that girl on that barstool, I have been told many times "gee, you don't look Jewish" and remained silent (or, worse, took it as a damned compliment). On the other hand, I have been known to let people go on and on about "this Jewish bastard" or about "the Kyke landlord" or about "the Jewish conspiracy that owns all the world's stocks and plots to limit my access to the pharmaceuticals I need" (yes, that is an actual meme out there) ... let them go on and on until they have taken all the rope they need to hang themselves, and then stood up and before leaving the table have let them know THEY WERE TALKING TO ONE.

But I have not done the whole trip that Hidary has done (at a much younger age). I never fully processed the shit I've sat and listened to that people felt safe to say in front of me because I "don't look Jewish" (odd, also, because I think I do "look Jewish") ...

Thanks, Vanessa, for crossing the desert for me and bringing this back with you:

American white-supremacy/fundamentalism

OK. I admit it. Frank Rich's article has me scared.

The At Long Last Death of William Zantziger

So now I find myself wishing that the Christian idea of some sort of final judgment is true. And hoping that Hattie Carrol's family breathes more freely and walks a bit lighter now.

This is what happened in 1963, a short stark write-up from the New York Times.


This is perhaps the best commentary on this "incident" among thousands upon thousands of similar "incidents" in the history of America (and of "civilization" in general):

London's Sean Bell

From BBC News:

A commuter who was sitting near Jean Charles de Menezes on a Tube train has told his inquest that police gave no warning before killing him.

Anna Dunwoodie said she believed officers were "out of control" and gave off a "sense of panic" before shooting.

She claimed that the innocent 27-year-old appeared calm as a gun was held to his head.

Mr de Menezes was killed in 2005 in south London by police who mistook him for a failed 21 July suicide bomber.

Ms Dunwoodie was sitting two or three seats to the left of Mr de Menezes when he boarded the train at Stockwell Tube Station, south London on 22 July 2005.

She told the inquest that, at the time, she thought the firearms officers pursuing Mr de Menezes were members of a gang.

He was shot seven times in the head at point-blank range after being mistaken for failed bomber Hussain Osman.

(Italics added.) Wow. I would think parents in families with Muslim-looking genealogy and Mulsim-sounding last names might identify enormously, these days, with parents of Black youth in the U.S. of A.

Bob Wails on Hillary the Divider

Bob Herbert on Hillary's comments to USA Today:

The Clintons have never understood how to exit the stage gracefully.

Their repertoire has always been deficient in grace and class. So there was Hillary Clinton cold-bloodedly asserting to USA Today that she was the candidate favored by “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” and that her opponent, Barack Obama, the black candidate, just can’t cut it with that crowd.

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton.

There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.

He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

Read the rest of Bob's point-blank rant ...