...The fact remains, however, that today’s Republican party owes a lot more to Nixon than it does to Lincoln. Racism, which I would define broadly as the belief that some races are inferior to others (and therefore deserve to be subjugated), is still part of the program.
Not that any Republican you meet would ever cop to being a racist. In fact, calling a Republican a racist is a good way to get your head bashed in. Somewhere along the line, overt racism became about as socially acceptable as pederasty, which I guess is a good thing.
Except that instead of becoming not racist, conservatives have busied themselves changing the definition of racism so it doesn’t apply to them anymore. The holy grail in this effort is the ongoing attempt to brand non-white, anti-racist activists as … racists.
The essential contours of this argument are simple enough: if we’re not allowed to discriminate against you for being brown, then you can’t discriminate against us for being white.
The reason so few sensible people take it seriously is that there is no effective anti-white discrimination in America or, for that matter, the world. Being white is almost universally easier than being any other color, just as being male is almost universally easier than being female. (If you’re white, male, and still angry, the problem is you.)
Conservatives like to point to the language of Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Sister Souljah, and Al Sharpton, but the ultimate target of that (outdated) rhetoric is white racism. Hating all white people because some white people are racist may technically count as a form of racial prejudice, but it barely registers when compared with the regime of institutional racism that enabled white people to buy and sell black people for hundreds of years and created a society that remains significantly unequal to this day.
Conservatives also like to object that slavery ended 144 years ago, but you don’t even have to cite the historical nearness of the Civil Rights movement to prove that objection irrelevant.
Consider this: the first known instance of slavery in America was recorded in 1619, which means that slavery existed here for 9.8 generations (using the current U.S. generation span of 25.2 years). It ended 5.7 generations ago.
For 9.8 generations, black people were systematically subjugated, their families systematically dismantled, their bodies systematically objectified.
White people, by contrast, had 9.8 generations to exploit black labor, profit from black productivity without giving anything back, accrue to themselves as many advantages as they possibly could, all under the cover of the law.
For four more generations after the 13th amendment abolished slavery, whites in much of the country defended and pressed their advantages under a new set of unfair laws, epitomized by the false logic of “separate but equal.”
If you want to be extremely generous to American equality and the goodwill of white people everywhere, the best you can argue is that whites and blacks have been on equal footing for less than two generations.
In a perfect meritocracy, maybe that would be enough to level the playing field. But we don’t live in a perfect meritocracy. Legacy matters, family matters, connections matter, and inevitably, unless the law insists otherwise, skin color matters. Maybe not to you, but to plenty of people.
So, yes, it’s preposterous to call advocates of affirmative action and all its sibling policies racist. If you think they’re illogical, or counterproductive, that’s your right. We can have an adult conversation about it.
But if you’re going to call brown people racist because they believe in protecting other brown people from white racism, I don’t have anything to say to you.
Except this: You’re the racist.
-Michael Hogan, Vanity Fair
my four year love affair pretty much ended last week. and despite the occasion, there was no pomp and circumstance, no fireworks, no standing ovations... he graduated and it... died. only thing left to look at are frustrating bbm convos, and the crumpled envelope that held a card he never received. oh and pictures from senior week that send my imagination running wild. but all this time... all the days, the nights, the arguments, the passive aggressive facebooking and the end was just so friggin uneventful, i didn't notice it was over until well... i said, you have to come back for something? and he said, nah.Tomorrow is Memorial Day, the day we have set aside to honor by remembering all the Americans who have died fighting for the thing we like the most about our America: the freedom we have to live as we please.
No official day to remember is adequate for something like that. It's too formal. It gets to be just another day on the calendar. No one would know from Memorial Day that Richie M., who was shot through the forehead coming onto Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, wore different color socks on each foot because he thought it brought him good luck.
No one would remember on Memorial Day that Eddie G. had promised to marry Julie W. the day after he got home from the war, but didn’t marry Julie because he never came home from the war. Eddie was shot dead on an un-American desert island, Iwo Jima.
For too many Americans, Memorial Day has become just another day off. There's only so much time any of us can spend remembering those we loved who have died, but the men, boys really, who died in our wars deserve at least a few moments of reflection during which we consider what they did for us.
They died.
We use the phrase "gave their lives," but they didn’t give their lives. Their lives were taken from them.
There is more bravery at war than in peace, and it seems wrong that we have so often saved this virtue to use for our least noble activity - war. The goal of war is to cause death to other people.
Because I was in the Army during World War II, I have more to remember on Memorial Day than most of you. I had good friends who were killed.
Charley Wood wrote poetry in high school. He was killed when his Piper Cub was shot down while he was flying as a spotter for the artillery.
Bob O'Connor went down in flames in his B-17.
Obie Slingerland and I were best friends and co-captains of our high school football team. Obie was killed on the deck of the Saratoga when a bomb that hadn’t dropped exploded as he landed.
I won’t think of them anymore tomorrow, Memorial Day, than I think of them any other day of my life.
Remembering doesn’t do the remembered any good, of course. It's for ourselves, the living. I wish we could dedicate Memorial Day, not to the memory of those who have died at war, but to the idea of saving the lives of the young people who are going to die in the future if we don’t find some new way - some new religion maybe - that takes war out of our lives.
That would be a Memorial Day worth celebrating.
“This is you, as a cynic, believing in something”
As we workshopped his piece, Tilden offered some kind of omniscient view into what he was trying to achieve. I scattered to find a clean page on which to write her words, and then I gawked at them for about two minutes. Their ink seeped into the pages of my notebook after I closed the book, as I told myself I’d deal with them later.
It is in the multiplicity of us that I find solace. The white black girl. The mentee’d mentor. The sarcastic recycler. The skeptical tour guide. Each day we engaged in a war of whose story is crazier, more gripping, funnier, sadder, more beautiful. I write because I owed it to them to unpack my history. Because we were a team, guiding, molding, and sewing together the fabric of our writing lives. I write because something in me always wants to call her “Mama Tilden” aloud. I write because we just worked.
And also because if this sounds overly cheesy, someone will most likely point it out.
I want to know if that's actual top model Coco Rocha in the gold dress, and whether it's really made of scales. I want to know more about the girl in the hot-pink-heeled shoes and white dress with bodice decorations that look like recycled candy wrappers. I even want to see the front of the purple dress on the girl standing to Hilary's left. ALL of that is more interesting to me than La Swank and her miserable orange outfit. The bodice makes her boobs look depressed, and the rest of it seems all caught up in itself and messy and as if she's so rife with static cling that she could walk up and touch a lamppost and the ensuing electric spark would light up the whole of New York for two hours. And yet... it also manages to be boring. Quite an achievement, Hilary. But maybe I sold her short -- I mean, the fact that I devoted this many sentences to her just proves she DOES somewhat stand out in the crowd, if perhaps not in the way she intended." (tagged: boring, orange)
I think the way Hov is, everyone started getting on these celebrity couples after they seen Hov and [B] which I believe is the one true, real one. I want em to make it. I like those two a lot. Hov is my brother and I'm just happy for them now. But they thing looks really real and with everyone else, it's like Hov tells you to take off your throwbacks and put on button-downs and that's what they do. That's like what's 'in' now."
