In a post in the Crime thread the other day concerning a Deadspin article that made an unflattering reference to Caste Football, I wrote: "You'll be proud to know that supporters of this site are 'yahoos' and that White football players like Jerry Kramer were no different than the epidemic of black thugs engaging in such hobbies as aggravated assault, drug dealing, and sexually attacking and battering females off the football field during the past 20 years. Because anything negative that blacks do, Whitey does equally as much if not more, but those horrible White supremacists that are still running things in 2013 just as they were a half century ago cover it up."
The half century ago reference came to mind as I was reading this unbelievable piece of crap article by someone called "Ta-Nehisi Coates." He went bonkers after Forest Whitaker, who is a prominent black character actor but hardly as well known and recognized by the public as Will Smith or Denzel Washington, was falsely accused by a Manhattan employee of stealing. The employee's mistake could only have been motivated by racism according to the inflamed mind of Coates, who like many blacks still believes it's 1950, or maybe 1850.
This op-ed can be easily dismissed as the rantings of a loon, but this article was written for and printed by The New York Times. As for Coates himself (I assume he's male by a reference to his wife in the article, but who knows with the first name of Ta-Nehisi, maybe they're a same sex couple), he's a senior editor at The Atlantic, a feminist/anti-white establishment outlet which giddily likes to celebrate what they anticipate is an upcoming "end of men."
This is the kind of article that blacks and white liberals slop up every day and immediately conform their views to to be in sync with the latest calibrations of the party line that they follow like the hive insects they are. Notice that there are no shades of gray in this extremely warped perspective, literally -- he still writes as if only blacks and Whites populate America, and he also describes himself as "different" from his wife, who has been "at war" with Whites since she was 6. So apparently Ta-Nehisi is a "moderate" in the undeclared, 45 year race war against White America.
The good, racist people
Last month, actor Forest Whitaker was stopped in a Manhattan delicatessen by an employee. Whitaker is one of the pre-eminent actors of his generation, with a diverse and celebrated catalog ranging from “The Great Debaters” to “The Crying Game” to “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” By now it is likely that he has adjusted to random strangers who can’t get his turn as Idi Amin out of their heads. But the man who approached the Oscar winner at the deli last month was in no mood for autographs. The employee stopped Whitaker, accused him of shoplifting and then promptly frisked him. The act of self-deputization was futile. Whitaker had stolen nothing. On the contrary, he’d been robbed.
The deli where Whitaker was harassed happens to be in my neighborhood. Columbia University is up the street. Broadway, the main drag, is dotted with nice restaurants and classy bars that cater to beautiful people. I like my neighborhood. And I’ve patronized the deli with some regularity, often several times in a single day. I’ve sent my son in my stead. My wife would often trade small talk with whoever was working checkout. Last year when my niece visited, she loved the deli so much that I felt myself a sideshow. But it’s understandable. It’s a good deli.
Since the Whitaker affair, I’ve read and listened to interviews with the owner of the establishment. He is apologetic to a fault and is sincerely mortified. He says that it was a “sincere mistake” made by a “decent man” who was “just doing his job.” I believe him. And yet for weeks now I have walked up Broadway, glancing through its windows with a mood somewhere between Marvin Gaye’s “Distant Lover” and Al Green’s “For the Good Times.”
In modern America, we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist. In 1957, neighbors in Levittown, Pa., uniting under the flag of segregation, wrote: “As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community.”
A half-century later, little had changed. Comedian Michael Richards (Kramer on “Seinfeld”) once yelled at a black heckler from the stage: “He’s a ******! He’s a ******! He’s a ******!” Confronted about this, Richards apologized and then said, “I’m not a racist” and called the claim “insane.”
The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years.
But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those who play by the rules, who observe the norms of the “middle class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only half-enforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of the American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as such.
I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.
The other day I walked past this particular deli. I believe its owners to be good people. I felt ashamed at withholding business for something far beyond the merchant’s reach. I mentioned this to my wife. My wife is not like me. When she was 6, a little white boy called her cousin a ******, and it has been war ever since. “What if they did that to your son?” she asked.
And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, wrote this for The New York Times.
Read more: http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/mar/11/good-racist-people/#ixzz2NHgih2OJ
The half century ago reference came to mind as I was reading this unbelievable piece of crap article by someone called "Ta-Nehisi Coates." He went bonkers after Forest Whitaker, who is a prominent black character actor but hardly as well known and recognized by the public as Will Smith or Denzel Washington, was falsely accused by a Manhattan employee of stealing. The employee's mistake could only have been motivated by racism according to the inflamed mind of Coates, who like many blacks still believes it's 1950, or maybe 1850.
This op-ed can be easily dismissed as the rantings of a loon, but this article was written for and printed by The New York Times. As for Coates himself (I assume he's male by a reference to his wife in the article, but who knows with the first name of Ta-Nehisi, maybe they're a same sex couple), he's a senior editor at The Atlantic, a feminist/anti-white establishment outlet which giddily likes to celebrate what they anticipate is an upcoming "end of men."
This is the kind of article that blacks and white liberals slop up every day and immediately conform their views to to be in sync with the latest calibrations of the party line that they follow like the hive insects they are. Notice that there are no shades of gray in this extremely warped perspective, literally -- he still writes as if only blacks and Whites populate America, and he also describes himself as "different" from his wife, who has been "at war" with Whites since she was 6. So apparently Ta-Nehisi is a "moderate" in the undeclared, 45 year race war against White America.
The good, racist people
Last month, actor Forest Whitaker was stopped in a Manhattan delicatessen by an employee. Whitaker is one of the pre-eminent actors of his generation, with a diverse and celebrated catalog ranging from “The Great Debaters” to “The Crying Game” to “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” By now it is likely that he has adjusted to random strangers who can’t get his turn as Idi Amin out of their heads. But the man who approached the Oscar winner at the deli last month was in no mood for autographs. The employee stopped Whitaker, accused him of shoplifting and then promptly frisked him. The act of self-deputization was futile. Whitaker had stolen nothing. On the contrary, he’d been robbed.
The deli where Whitaker was harassed happens to be in my neighborhood. Columbia University is up the street. Broadway, the main drag, is dotted with nice restaurants and classy bars that cater to beautiful people. I like my neighborhood. And I’ve patronized the deli with some regularity, often several times in a single day. I’ve sent my son in my stead. My wife would often trade small talk with whoever was working checkout. Last year when my niece visited, she loved the deli so much that I felt myself a sideshow. But it’s understandable. It’s a good deli.
Since the Whitaker affair, I’ve read and listened to interviews with the owner of the establishment. He is apologetic to a fault and is sincerely mortified. He says that it was a “sincere mistake” made by a “decent man” who was “just doing his job.” I believe him. And yet for weeks now I have walked up Broadway, glancing through its windows with a mood somewhere between Marvin Gaye’s “Distant Lover” and Al Green’s “For the Good Times.”
In modern America, we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist. In 1957, neighbors in Levittown, Pa., uniting under the flag of segregation, wrote: “As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community.”
A half-century later, little had changed. Comedian Michael Richards (Kramer on “Seinfeld”) once yelled at a black heckler from the stage: “He’s a ******! He’s a ******! He’s a ******!” Confronted about this, Richards apologized and then said, “I’m not a racist” and called the claim “insane.”
The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years.
But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those who play by the rules, who observe the norms of the “middle class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only half-enforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of the American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as such.
I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.
The other day I walked past this particular deli. I believe its owners to be good people. I felt ashamed at withholding business for something far beyond the merchant’s reach. I mentioned this to my wife. My wife is not like me. When she was 6, a little white boy called her cousin a ******, and it has been war ever since. “What if they did that to your son?” she asked.
And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, wrote this for The New York Times.
Read more: http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/mar/11/good-racist-people/#ixzz2NHgih2OJ
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