As my mother told me...

Got the headline off Insty. He uses it for occasions like this.

I WAS TOLD THIS WAS ABOUT CONFEDERATE GENERALS: Vandals behead statue at Chattanooga Catholic church before Saturday Mass services.

My mother was born in late 1909 and saw the rise and fall of the resurgent KKK. She used to say there was a joke that the letters stood for Kikes, Katholics, and Koloreds.

And so it is again. By exactly the same crowd. They'll say it's about oppression, but who gets oppressed?

And, you'll be interested to know, the city of Asheville NC has voted "reparations" in the form of investments in housing, health care and career growth. Why does the face of Jessuh Jackson appear before me as I consider this?

For those who dare question this appropriation of their tax money, the answer is, "[Slavery] is this institution that serves as the starting point for the building of the strong economic floor for white America, while attempting to keep Blacks subordinate forever to its progress".

And my reading of history was the slave-holding South was stagnating while the industrial North and free West were growing.

It's going to be interesting to follow the money.

It's all a lie

This post was inspired by MamaM, whose very touching words from behind enemy lines inspired me.

That's a photo of George Floyd and the officer accused of killing him. You will note Officer J. Alexander Kueng is not white. You will also not he is nowhere near the size of George Floyd. As I noted in a comment, the autopsy said Floyd died from an OD of fenanyl and meth (when you read how, be ready to roll your eyes).

We must all ask ourselves, if we were the cop and had a guy that big freaking out, how do you subdue him?

Here's a link to the https://www.startribune.com/read-the-transcript-of-thomas-lane-s-body-camera-footage/571678791/transcript from the cop's body cam.

I'm also linking the https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/07/must-read-body-cam-transcript-tells-different-story-death-george-floyd/post from Gateway, which contains pertinent background material such as the fact the Minneapolis (or Mogadishu On The Mississippi, as the locals call it) DA withheld all this while the country was burning.

So, how does this relate to Mama's post?  Simply that the Lefties, all of them, are lying; whether it is Kung Flu or race issues or the economy or anything else. When I was a lad 50 years ago, I read a piece in the local paper saying how the Establishment always lied if the truth didn't fit the narrative. That never rang true to me and I started watching the news a little more carefully and began to realize it wasn't the Establishment that was lying.

That was before I heard the line, presumably from Uncle Saul, "Accuse them of what we do". There are those who challenge it was Uncle Saul, but it certainly sounds like him.

Today, the hippies are the Establishment and they lie whether the truth fits or not.

To race or not to race...

....was that the question?

WKRLEM: Patrice O'Neal vs. Asian People (NOT SAFE FOR WORK)

"Not that any of it is real to me. I've never experienced a human look from an Oriental. And I return the favor."

Would colleges play this movie today?

Link

WaPo: ‘White Student Union’ challenges Black Lives Matter at University of Illinois

"A Facebook page ostensibly created for an audience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign called “Illini White Students Union” has drawn fire after it characterized the national Black Lives Matter movement as “terrorism.”"

The page did not last long in its original incarnation, but was taken down after three hours. It has since been revived here.

“We recognize the right to free speech, and we encourage you to exercise that right when you see examples of racism, discrimination or intimidation on our campus,” Interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson, who called the page “extremely disturbing,” wrote in a message Thursday to the student body.

In an anonymous message to the News-Gazette, the page’s administrator discussed Black Lives Matter.

“We feel they disrupt student daily life and activity far too much,” the message read, saying that movement “marginalizes” white students. “… We are in the United States and not Africa and we don’t desire to have an African flag on campus.”

"Casting of white actor as Martin Luther King prompts outrage from playwright"

"Ohio university production of Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop featured a white and black actor as King, which Hall says was ‘disrespectful’ and a ‘disservice’"

The casting of a white actor as Martin Luther King in an Ohio university production of Katori Hall’s acclaimed play The Mountaintop was “a disservice to not just Dr King but an entire community”, the playwright has said.

Hall wrote an essay for the African American cultural website the Root on Monday about Kent State University’s production of her play, which dramatizes the night before King was assassinated in 1968.

Hall told the Guardian that director Michael Oatman’s decision to double-cast the six-show production with a black actor and a white actor as King went “deeper than just casting a white man in the role of MLK”.

“I just really feel as though it echoes this pervasive erasure of the black body and the silencing of a black community – theatrically and also, literally, in the world,” she said.

Oatman, who like Hall is black, said in a statement in August promoting the play that he chose a white actor for the production “to explore the issue of racial ownership and authenticity”.

“I didn’t want this to be a stunt, but a true exploration of King’s wish that we all be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin,” Oatman said. “I wanted the contrast … I wanted to see how the words rang differently or indeed the same, coming from two different actors, with two different racial backgrounds.”

Oatman did not respond to a request for comment...

Bernie Sanders: U.S. Founded on ‘Racist Principles’

"Bernie Sanders said the United States was founded on “racist principles” during a speech at Liberty University on Monday. The senator from Vermont and Democratic presidential candidate referred to incidents of police shooting unarmed black men as examples of continued institutionalized racism. “We have got to stand up and say, in America you’re not going to do that. Racism is unacceptable,” he said."

A quote and a video

“...When I was a kid we were in love with America. As early as I can remember, there was a civics class in my public school. And I was in love with those things that guaranteed freedom before I learned that there were people who hated me because I was Jewish. I had a Bill of Rights and a Constitution, those words out of the Declaration that protected me. And I knew about that because we had civics in class. We don’t have that much in the country anymore. So before World War II or shortly after, we were in love with America because we understood what it was about and that’s what we were in love with. I believe everybody’s patriotic today. Everybody loves America. But I don’t need their flag plans to prove it. I’d like to go back to civics lessons...”  — Legendary TV producer Norman Lear

Below is a video of a "reporter expelled from public university ‘Black Lives’ event for not being of ‘African descent’"

Link to video

David Brooks: Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White

Quotable David Brook responds to a letter/book author Ta-nehisi Coates wrote to his son.

Your new book, “Between the World and Me,” is a great and searing contribution to this public education. It is a mind-altering account of the black male experience... There is a pervasive physicality to your memoir — the elemental vulnerability of living in a black body in America. Written as a letter to your son, you talk about the effects of pervasive fear...

But the disturbing challenge of your book is your rejection of the American dream. My ancestors chose to come here. For them, America was the antidote to the crushing restrictiveness of European life, to the pogroms...

Your ancestors came in chains. In your book the dream of the comfortable suburban life is a “fairy tale.” For you, slavery is the original American sin, from which there is no redemption. America is Egypt without the possibility of the Exodus. African-American men are caught in a crushing logic, determined by the past, from which there is no escape... You write to your son, “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”...

In what is bound to be the most quoted passage from the book, you write that you watched the smoldering towers of 9/11 with a cold heart. At the time you felt the police and firefighters who died “were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.” You obviously do not mean that literally today (sometimes in your phrasing you seem determined to be misunderstood). You are illustrating the perspective born of the rage “that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.”

I read this all like a slap and a revelation. I suppose the first obligation is to sit with it, to make sure the testimony is respected and sinks in. But I have to ask, Am I displaying my privilege if I disagree? Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions? Does a white person have standing to respond? If I do have standing, I find the causation between the legacy of lynching and some guy’s decision to commit a crime inadequate to the complexity of most individual choices.

I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.

In your anger at the tone of innocence some people adopt to describe the American dream, you reject the dream itself as flimflam. But a dream sullied is not a lie. The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow.

This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.

"Dolezal Wanted to Boycott Exodus for Casting White Actors as Africans"

"Dolezal made the comments during an interview with local Spokane radio station KYRS. “You have white, European actors playing North African historical figures, like they were in the ’30s and the ’40s,” complained host Taylor Weech."

“A lot of people might go to the film. Hopefully nobody goes to that film,” Dolezal said. “We need to boycott that film from my perspective…”

Dolezal denounced the film as “miseducation [sic],” “misrepresentation,” and “highly offensive” to ancient Egyptians. “And also to people today,” she continued, “it’s robbing and shredding ancestry and history.”

Via Reddit

Rachel Dolezal, in her own words

 

Link to video

 

"In early 2014, I had the opportunity to interview Rachel Dolezal for my senior thesis. These videos are unedited."...   Part 2 of a 5 part interview of Rachel.

"Rachel Dolezal's appearance is 'blackface,' brother says"

"On that day three years ago, he said, his sister Rachel Dolezal, 37, told him she was starting life anew in Spokane, Washington, where she's now head of the local chapter of the NAACP and chairwoman of a police oversight committee."

Ezra Dolezal came to visit her from Montana, where their parents live. His adopted sister was on her way to becoming one of the most prominent faces in Spokane's black community.

"She told me not to blow her cover about the fact that she had this secret life or alternate identity," Ezra Dolezal said Saturday. "She told not to tell anybody about Montana or her family over there. She said she was starting a new life ... and this one person over there was actually going to be her black father." (read more)

Someone on twitter is claiming questioning Dolezal's entry into Howard University, a historically black college, may have come at the expense of a natural born... African American person of color.

"Researchers Find Genes That Can Make You Look Younger By 10 Years"

Could the genetic advantage be called black privilege?

The researchers discovered that the younger gene is present in around 10 percent of white Americans and 20 percent of black Americans. The team believes that this gene has helped make these individuals look 10 years younger than they actually were.

These findings could help explain how celebrities, such as Hollywood actress Halle Berry, 48, and supermodel Iman, 59, could retain their youthful looks.

"Many of us felt that people with darker skin aged better because of more pigment and better photo [sunlight] protection, but we have found there is much more to it than that," Kimball said.

"They have other characteristics in their skin which confer good ageing, which until now we had no idea about."

"Who Are the Racists: Conservatives or Liberals?"

"Michelle Obama Lets Loose on Race in Graduation Speech"

"The road ahead is not going to be easy... It never is, especially for folks like you and me."

"As potentially the first African-American first lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations, conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others," she told the class of 2015. "Was I too loud or too emasculating? Or was I too soft? Too much of a mom and not enough of a career woman?"...

"Then there was the first time I was on a magazine cover," Obama told the graduates at the historically black Alabama college. "It was a cartoon drawing of me with a huge afro and a machine gun. Now, yeah, it was satire, but if I'm really being honest, it knocked me back a bit. It made me wonder 'just how are people seeing me?'"...

"We've both felt the sting of those daily slights throughout our entire lives. The folks who crossed the street in fear of their safety, the clerks who kept a close eye on us in all those department stores. The people at formal events who assumed we were the help," Obama said. "And those who have questioned our intelligence, our honesty, even our love of this country, and I know that these little indignities are obviously nothing compared to what folks across the country are dealing with every single day. Those nagging worries about whether you're going to get stopped or pulled over for absolutely no reason. The fear that your job application will be overlooked because of the way your name sounds." (video at the link)

'Facts Matter' says college student

"What if we limited the number of white men in film and TV?"

"Creatively, a bad idea—but so is peppering diversity onto default casts."

I should note my 31% cap would in no way limit the number of awesome projects in development; it would just change the breakdown of their casts. After all, as a woman who wants to have any kind of cultural literacy, I’m expected to engage with white-male-centric stories all the time. And even though they're low on ladies, I love Saving Private Ryan, Lord Of The Flies, True Detective, Toy Story, The History Boys, The Godfather and The West Wing. So why shouldn’t white men get equal enjoyment out of watching stories in which they aren’t represented?

Fantastic TV shows like Orange Is The New Black, Empire, Call The Midwife, Black-ish, Fresh Off The Boat, The Bletchley Circle, and Orphan Black prove that increased diversity can open up new storytelling avenues for everyone to enjoy.

Another example: While I feel fairly confident in saying the white male perspective on World War II has been thoroughly covered over the last 75 years of filmmaking, there are fewer films that explore women on the home front, all-black platoons, or Japanese-American internment camps. If we insist on revisiting that time period over and over again, why not do so from a fresh angle?

Sure it’s true that part of the demand for better representation is about social justice: We as a society have determined that equality makes the world a better place.

But demands for increased representation are also demands for new stories. In fact, we already ask for diversity from Hollywood all the time when it comes to genres, styles, tones, and characters (from comedies to dramas, blockbusters to arthouse films, heroes to antiheroes).

Adding more racial and gender diversity is just one more way to foster fresh storytelling. And that’s inarguably a good thing.

"Police shooting death of black man sparks protests in Wisconsin"

"A police officer followed the man back to an apartment, where the man reportedly attacked the officer. “The officer did draw his revolver and subsequently shot the subject,” Madison Police Chief Mike Koval said...

An editor for the UW-Madison student newspaper The Badger Herald tweeted a photo of the protest and reported that the crowd chanted “black lives matter,” a rallying cry that has gained prominence in the wake of the police-involved deaths of black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York.

 

(Update) The young man killed had prior arrests (ht Michael Haz)

"Nike launches Black History Month collection"

"Shoe geeks should get excited — some NBA stars' lines are getting updates as part of the collection, as are Air Jordans and other styles."

Black History Month starts Feb. 1, and Nike's new BHM collection launched today. It is available globally at nike.com and select retailers.

A portion of proceeds from sales of the 2015 BHM Collection go to the Ever Higher Fund, which supports organizations that leverage the power of sport to maximize the potential of underserved youth.