This pledge is titled, “THE MARRIAGE VOW: A Declaration of Dependence Upon MARRIAGE and FAMiLY.” … To their partial credit, their pledge opens by acknowledging that one cannot claim to defend marriage without focusing on the high divorce rate, broken families, infidelity and other challenges (besides THE GAYS) “threatening” traditional marriage. … To their discredit, the first bullet point is:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.

This is the point at which my brain started to bleed from the anger + incredulousness + assault by batshittery.

Why stop at two-parent households? Let’s celebrate the free housing, healthcare and meal plan offered to every black slave! You know what else slavery did for black people? Exercise! Oh it was just great! We even got to work outside. Speaking of work, today, African-American unemployment is over 16 percent. In Milwauke, Wisc., over one-third of black men are unemployed. But during slavery times, every black man had a job! See, things were better in the past, and now things are bad. Ah, the good old days…

Scope whole thing over at Baratunde Thurston’s blog.

From The Angry Black Tumblr | Comment below or Reblog @ Tumblr

“They love America the way a four-year old loves her mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a four-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad, and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world. That’s why we liberals want America to do the right thing. We know America is the hope of the world, and we love it and want it to do well. We also want it to do good.” -

— Al Franken

(via dulce)

Re-blogged for being 100% right.

(via nefariousnewt)

OMG THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS.

(salymander)

via: emilytheslayer

From The Angry Black Tumblr | Comment below or Reblog @ Tumblr

This has been linked everywhere but I’m going to post it again because everything he says is true and this needs a signal boost to the sky.

Perhaps when our alien overlords do finally come, they will spare some of us because of this man.

Baratunde Thurston Lays It All Out For America -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

It’s not often I cede the floor to a white guy, but Keith makes some good points. Bottom line, this community center everyone is trying to get you up in arms about is: A) Not a mosque, and B) Not at Ground Zero.

Oh, and one other thing: Ground Zero is not holy ground. It’s true that many people’s remains may still be there, but that does not make it holy ground nor does it make the general area off limits to houses of worship that you disagree with. Not in America, at any rate.

There Is No Ground Zero Mosque -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Adviser for Americans arrested in Haiti suspected of Child Trafficking in El Salvador. So am I supposed to believe they just happened to find someone connected to human trafficking and hired him? Don’t answer that. In other “I hate the world” news this shit right here? Prime example of what happens when groups get so focused on their pet interest that they throw all logic and common sense out the window. The reality is that abortions are not happening because Planned Parenthood exists. Long before Margaret Sanger was a notion in her mother’s eye women had ways to end a pregnancy. And they did so (and still do so) for a lot of reasons having nothing to do with race, though as with everything else racism does play a part in the underpinnings of some of those reasons.

First up, there’s the purely financial aspect of things. We live in a country that begrudges people a living wage and health insurance. For some reason these are viewed as things you have to earn, and if you don’t manage to secure them then it’s all your fault for not using those magical boostraps. Never mind pesky details like limited educational opportunities, a sagging job market, and the overall lack of boots or straps that plague much of our population. Attitudes toward public assistance are ugly and filled with all sort of ridiculous myths about recipients. Especially recipients of color. That Welfare Queen schtick is alive and well along with an idea that more money = better parents. Not true.

Then there’s the reality that not every relationship that produces a child is a safe healthy long term one. That’s not exclusive to any race, but the reality is that a WOC in an abusive situation is going to have an even harder time getting help. And more kids can make it harder to leave. And of course there’s the simply reality that not every pregnancy is a wanted pregnancy for a whole other host of reasons. But hey, why let facts get in the way when you can fin all new ways to pretend that WOC don’t love their children. After all, if they breed them but can’t feed them then the answer is to steal save them right? Right. Oh wait, I was supposed to be outraged at the idea of abortion wasn’t I? Sorry, I reserve that emotion for stupid manipulative ad campaigns that ignore reality.

Evaluating the Outrageous -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

So there’s a minor tempest in a teapot at the moment because the Republicans’ racism slip is showing again. Shiny new Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins uttered a very Freudian slip at one of her public addresses, suggesting that “Republicans are struggling right now to find the great white hope.” Brava, Congresswoman! Way to step in it right out of the box. Predictably, the media’s given a collective gasp to show that it is shocked, shocked I tell you, that there is any whiff of open racism in the party’s agenda. Keith Olbermann has called for the congresswoman to face “some sort of sanction”, and the rest of the left is practically salivating for its pound of flesh. And of course, the congresswoman is hastening to fauxpologize and clarify that she didn’t mean to invoke deadly race riots and racist history, no, never, ‘course not.

Y’know what? I’m tired of this.

I want the Republicans to just stop dancing around the issue. Drop all the dogwhistles and “I know you are but what am I” crap; ditch the dramatic irony of using racists to cry racism. I want them to just come out and say that this is what they want:

From sea to bright, white, shining sea.

Because if that’s what they want, fine. There’s nowhere near enough white men in this country to win them another election. Once they’ve alienated all the PoC, all the women, all the GLBTQIs, everybody who doesn’t look and act like them, they’ll have relegated themselves to political obscurity. Then they won’t regain power and screw up our economy again, get us into another dumbass war, threaten to turn us into a theocracy, or make the rest of us feel ashamed of being American.

So I hope they find their Great White Hope. I hope they embrace their racism, and their neo-Southern Strategy, until it kills them. Then we can relegate them to the bin of history, and maybe a sane conservative party will take its place — or better still, several sane new parties. And maybe then we can actually start trying to become, y’know, post-racial. (Whatever the hell that is.)

Let Them Have Their Great White Hope -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

For most of my adult life, I’ve had to live without health insurance. Because I was a freelancer for many years, or because I did not have a fixed residence for a while, or because my skills and career interests often meant that the best jobs available to me were with small companies or non-profit organizations that did not offer benefits. I spent something like 6 years without health insurance.

Whenever I caught bronchitis (about once a year), I had to wait it out and hope that it wouldn’t develop into pneumonia. I constantly worried that the cancer I’ve been free and clear of for years would come back. If I ever broke a bone? I was screwed. Once I caught a severe bacterial infection and lived with it for over a week before finally breaking down and going to a doctor though I knew I couldn’t afford it. Forget about managing my high blood pressure, or getting advice on avoiding the diabetes and heart disease that runs in my family.

My situation was hardly the most dire. I may have been one emergency room trip away from missing my rent payment, but I have a large and loving family, so I have a net. Many people don’t. Many people do not have the benefits of education and skill that I have. Many people are like me, with skills that are useful and sought after, but not always by companies that can afford to bring them on full time, or offer benefits to any staff. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of other reasons why a person may not have access to health insurance, and are therefore barred from regular access to health care.

Any time I hear someone going on about how horrible socialized or universal or government-run health care is, I think back to the many nights I would go to bed worried that my heart palpitations meant the onset of a heart attack, but I couldn’t afford to go to the emergency room just to be sure (the last time I had done so it cost me $250 for a doctor to look at me for 5 minutes and say I was fine). So I’d fall asleep, heart racing, probably in the midst of a heart attack, partially convinced I might not wake up in the morning. I also think of my friend with asthma who would suffer through particularly bad attacks which the over the counter spray did not alleviate, hoping that it would pass, or that breathing techniques would work, and calculating if she had enough credit on her Visa to pay for the emergency room again. Or that little boy who died because of an infection in his tooth that would have been simple to fix except his mother couldn’t afford to take him to a dentist.

Every time I see protesters or blowhards on television I wish I could infect them with 5 minutes of the terror a person without insurance feels when they know that something is seriously wrong but don’t know if it’s wrong enough to warrant possibly missing a house or car payment. I’m willing to bet that most of these people haven’t spent very much time without an insurance net. Certainly not with a serious or chronic illness, either in themselves or a family member. Certainly not while having just enough money to get by. It’s so easy to protest and condemn when you’re comfortable, well-off, and secure, isn’t it?

On Health Care -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

I was totally planning to talk about something other than race and racism today. But then I read this post about residential schools and the subsequent fallout in Canada. And it got me thinking about the long term impact of racism on our community and the half life of such a virulent disease. (Some of the comments also pissed me off, but again we’re back to context and respect and I’m just not in the mood today.) And the fact that even though reparations for the descendants of slaves has been a hotly debated topic for years now, no one seems to be willing to make reparations for the effects of racism itself. I’m not even talking about cash (or the famed 40 acres and a mule) moreso I’m thinking of steps being taken to heal the damaged thought processes that have become such a part of our society.

Obviously we can’t change what’s being taught at home. But, what about investing in teaching history properly with all the facts from K-12th grade instead of letting college be the place where people (those who take the right classes and pay attention in them) get a clue about race relations throughout history? Or spending less money on jails and weapons and more on targeted social programs and funding quality schools for all? Access to quality medical care and decent food couldn’t hurt, especially if we stop criminalizing poverty and start trying to eradicate it. There is so much that could be done to actually level the playing field and benefit everyone. Racism (and the other ‘isms) will destroy society if left unchecked so let’s vaccinate our children.

Mind you, none of these ideas are new and none of them are going to fix what’s wrong right here and right now. But, if we took a long term view and we set a stage for our kids where diplomacy and respect trumped “Those people are all X” and “We have to protect our way of life” then just maybe 200 years from now there won’t be a need for conversations about whether or not people forced into schools dedicated to destroying their culture and their language were abused “enough” to qualify for reparations. Possibly we could be a society that doesn’t think assimilation is the key to success. Maybe (and I know this is a big maybe) we could stop bigotry before it starts and really turn this into a post-racial, post-classist, post-sexist society?

Curing Racism…wouldn’t inoculation be easier? -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

…about all this “birther” crap, in which fine upstanding folk who are legitimate natural-born citizens of this fine country (the US of A, because we’re all from it or want to be from it, of course) incessantly and illogically question the fact that our president is also legitimately natural-born…

…is that they’re not crazy. They’re just fucking racists.

I mean, it’s obvious with the Republicans. They’re just using this shit (and other shit) to blow smoke over their attempt to scuttle single-payer healthcare. But all these individual teabagging crackpots who jump up at rallies and rant about Obama being from Kenya? They’re not really crackpots. They’re just the same old garden-variety racists we’ve always had, using “he’s not a citizen” as a euphemism for “he’s not completely white OMFG he’s got 50% black cooties straight outta Africa and I bet the White House smells funny now somebody go get a roooope!!!”

See, although African Americans are generally better-off than other racial groups in this one respect — we don’t get the “But where are you really from?” schtick quite as often as Asians and Latinos/as — there’s still quite a bit of feeling out there that we aren’t really Americans. Yeah, even though we built the place. Even though most of the people saying this aren’t really (Native) Americans either, if that’s how they want to play it. It all just comes down to one very simple fact: that “American”, in the minds of these people, equals one thing — white.

So it really doesn’t matter how much proof gets shown to confirm that Obama is too, really, truly, an American. The birthers aren’t going to buy it. Because the only proof these people will accept is a 100% European American genetic makeup, or 99.44% with the incriminating .66 hidden acceptably far back in the family tree. That worked for McCain — don’t see the “birthers” going after him, do you? But since that ain’t gonna happen in Obama’s case, they’re never going to shut up.

We don’t need a new term for the birthers. They’re just the usual plain, boring old racists wearing new clothes and chanting new slogans, because they’ve figured out that slurs and hate speech just don’t have the same cachet these days. But underneath the new trappings, they’re the same old shit. So can we please stop paying so much attention to them and get back to healthcare?

The Thing Not Being Said -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

I haven’t said anything about the situation in Iran, mostly because I don’t feel qualified to speak about it. I’m watching it, though, following the Twitter feeds obsessively and learning as much as I can about Iran’s history. I’ve been finding fellow blogger Richard Jeffrey Newman’s posts over at Alas especially illuminating about the nuances not being covered in the mainstream media.

I had to think hard about posting this here at ABW, though, because for awhile I wasn’t sure whether the situation in a Persian-dominated country halfway around the world, which has its own entirely different racial issues, was on-topic. Then I remembered a book I’d read a few years back, and considered the historical context that’s a constant undercurrent of the Iran situation, and realized it’s completely spot-on for a discussion of racism.

Because modern racism’s roots, we must remember, lie in European and American imperialism. The many hideous dehumanizations of people of color started centuries ago as an attempt to justify the slave trade and its cruelties. These dehumanizations continue today for the purpose of justifying American financial interests (primarily in oil). We’ve seen this again and again, to most devastating effect in Africa and Latin America, but in other parts of the world as well.

Iran belongs in this category. I was aware that the CIA had helped to overthrow Iran’s last democratically-elected government in the 1950s, replacing it with the tyrannical Shah — which itself touched off the Iranian Revolution and seated the government that is now oppressing its own people. What I hadn’t realized was just how cynical and deliberate the imperialist process was, until I read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins.

Now, I didn’t like this book. Perkins, who spent the 1970s and 80s working for Chas T. Main, an engineering consulting firm — think Halliburton today — spends a little too much of the book glamorizing himself as some kind of geeky James Bond, lunching with power players and banging his way through the fairer sex; he reads to me as a guy on an extended midlife crisis. That said, the book is spot-on in revealing the ways in which American imperialists function in the modern day. Perkins explains that the NSA, CIA, and US business interests have repeatedly worked together to bribe, blackmail, frame, addict, overthrow, and if necessary, kill the leaders of other nations, so that ours can make more money. He touches on Iran, though only glancingly, but he provides enough other examples in Latin America and Asia, and shows enough of how the pattern works, that anyone who reads this book will have a clear idea of how American fucked up Iran.

And then compounded the initial assault over the next 30 years. Like many of us, I grew up thinking of Iran as “the country of religious fantatics who took American hostages, had something to do with the Contras, and just generally fucking hates us.” This was the framing of Reagan and his cronies, who — as imperialists themselves — had a vested interest in “othering” Iranians. There was frequently a racial component to this othering*, although sometimes it was just matter-of-factly self-serving.

I read Perkins’ book years ago, but I have to admit — I kept thinking of Iranians as a somewhat scary “they” and “them”, even though the book illuminated many of the ways in which they were us. If the US could have done so, it would happily have enslaved the Iranian people — economically if not literally — and frankly, some Americans are still trying. This, I suspect, is what’s really behind the inexplicable demands by Republicans that Obama make a stronger effort to endorse the protesters in Iran, even though this would be the equivalent of shooting the protest movement in the back. My guess is that they want Mousavi’s supporters to be suppressed — so that they can later send in “hit men” like Perkins to offer the same Faustian bargain that got offered to the Taliban of Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein of Iraq. This is their favorite tactic, according to Perkins: cultivate a disgruntled minority and then use their desperation for profit. The hit men arrive bearing gifts and a message of hope: Promise to support our interests and we’ll help you gain power, and then you’ll be free to keep that power in whatever fucked-up way you want.

But this is why I’m so hooked on the Twitter feeds. I no longer think of the Iranian people as “them,” and I don’t think I’m the only person to feel this way. Here’s an excerpt from Twitter Ripped the Veil Off ‘The Other’ — And We Saw Ourselves:

All the accumulated suspicion and fear and alienation from three decades of hostility between Iran and America seemed to slip away. Whatever happens, the ability of this new media to bring people together – to bring the entire world into this revolution on the streets of Iran – has already changed things dramatically.

Yeah. This.

So fight on, people of Iran. I know you don’t like me much; that’s cool. You got cause. I still wish there was more I could do to help — but I think the best thing I can do right now is write to my own American politicians, and urge them in the strongest possible terms to shut the fuck up. And I’ll keep watching. God be with you.

* I’m really, really sorry to link to a post on Michelle Malkin’s site, folks. Unfortunately, it’s a great example of the nastiness that’s out there.

Iran and American Imperialism -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman