Sunday, January 10, 2016

The "dream of whiteness".

Image result for field negro images I told myself that I wouldn't be doing too much cut and pasting this new year, but every now and then I come across an article that is so on point and so in sync with my own thoughts that I just have to share it with you.

This one is from the fine Canadian writer, Stephen Marche:

"The border.

You feel your whiteness properly at the American border. Most of the time being white is an absence of problems. The police don’t bother you so you don’t notice the police not bothering you. You get the job so you don’t notice not getting it. Your children are not confused with criminals. I live in downtown Toronto, in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in one of the most open cities in the world, where multiculturalism is the dominant civic value and the inert virtue of tolerance is the most prominent inheritance of the British empire, so if you squint you can pretend the ancient categories are dissipating into a haze of enlightenment and intermarriage.

Not at the border.

My son’s Guyanese-Canadian teacher and the Muslim Milton scholar I went to high school with and the Sikh writer I squabble about Harold Innis with and my Ishmaeli accountant, we can all be good little Torontonians of the middle class, deflecting the differences we have been trained to respect. But in a car in the carbon monoxide-infused queue waiting to enter Detroit, their beings diverge drastically from mine.

I am white. They are not. They are vulnerable. I am not.

Here’s the thing: I like the guards at the American border. They’re always friendly with me, decent, even enjoyable company. At the booth in between the never-was of Windsor and the has-been of Detroit, the officer I happened to draw had a gruff belly and the mysterious air of intentional inscrutability, like a troll under a bridge in a fairytale.

“Where are you headed?” he asked.

“Why would anyone ever choose to go to Burlington, Iowa?” he asked philosophically.
“I’m going to see Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.” Then, because it did seem to require an explanation: “They’re giving rallies within a couple of days of each other.”

“Why would anyone ever choose to go see Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders?”

I didn’t argue, because it was the border, but I could have said that the police chief of Birmingham estimated that 30,000 people showed up in Alabama to see Donald Trump in August and that in Dallas, he had filled the American Airlines Center, and that his counterpart, Bernie Sanders, has generated equally unprecedented numbers – vastly more than Barack Obama drew at comparable moments in the 2008 campaign.

“I’m curious,” I said instead.

At this point he asked me to roll down my window. But it was all fine. Like I said, I’m white.

I drove through the outskirts of the ruins of Detroit, across the I-94, one of the ugliest highways in the United States, the old familiar lightness fluttered to my heart. I love America. America is not my mother. Canada is my mother. But America is an unbelievably gorgeous, surprisingly sweet rich lady who lives next door and appears to be falling apart. I cannot help myself from loving it.

For people who love to dwell in contradictions, the US is the greatest country in the world: the land of the free built on slavery, the country of law and order where everyone is entitled to a gun, a place of unimpeded progress where they cling to backwardness out of sheer stubbornness. And into this glorious morass, a new contradiction has recently announced itself: the white people, the privileged Americans, the ones who had the least to fear from the powers that be, the ones with the surest paths to brighter futures, the ones who are by every metric one of the most fortunate groups in the history of the world, were starting to dying off in shocking numbers.

The Case and Deaton report, Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century, describes an increased death rate for middle-aged American whites “comparable to lives lost in the US Aids epidemic”. This spike in mortality is unique to white Americans – not to be found among other ethnic groups in the United States or any other white population in the developed world, a mysterious plague of despair.

In one way, it was easy to account for all this white American death – “drug and alcohol poisoning, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis”, according to the report. It was not so easy to account for the accounting. Why were middle-aged white Americans drinking and drugging and shooting themselves to death? The explanations on offer were pre-prepared, fully plugged into confirmation bias: it was the economy or it was demography or it was godlessness or it was religion or it was the breakdown of the family or it was the persistence of antique values or it was the lack of social programs or it was the dependence on social programs.

Case and Deaton call it “an epidemic of pain”. Fine. What does that mean?

On the I-94, you do find yourself asking: what the fuck is wrong with these people? I mean, aside from the rapid decline of the middle class obviously. And the rise of precarious work and the fact that the basic way of life requires so much sedation that nearly a quarter of all Americans are on psychiatric drugs, and somewhere between 26.4 and 36 million Americans abuse opioids every day. Oh yes, and the mass shootings. There was more than one mass shooting a day. And the white terrorists targeting black churches again. And the regularly released videos showing the police assassinating black people. And the police in question never being indicted, let alone being sent to jail.
And you know what Americans were worried about while all this shit was raining down on them? While all this insanity was wounding their beloved country? You know what their number one worry was, according to poll after poll after poll?
Muslims. Muslims, if you can believe it.

‘The American dream is dead but I’m going to make it stronger!’

My body is white and it is male. It is six foot tall and weighs 190lb. It is 39 years old and it has had to start running. It has had to start counting calories. There is a tingle in the joint of my right thigh, so I try not to think about my body. The tingling comes and goes. I know my body is going to kill me.

“A man who fears suffering already suffer what he fears,” as Montaigne said. That’s one of the reasons why men die so much younger than women – six years younger on average in America.

Ninety-two percent of men say they wait at least a few days to see if they feel better before they go to a doctor, but I know what they mean by a few days. They mean a few more days than makes sense. It is hard to have a male and white body and to conceive of its weakness. In the same breath, my body cannot bring itself to believe it is the personification of power, though it evidently is in any rational accountancy of social status. It feels like a mere body. It feels mortal.

I’ve never been to a place as white as Iowa. That’s the honest truth. Whenever I go to America it’s New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or Florida. In Burlington, at Jerry’s Main Lunch, the signature dish is “the hot mess, eggs and bacon cooked right into the hash browns. The sugar shakers all have white crackers in them, to prevent clumping – a classic bit of commonsense American know-how. The hot mess is delicious. Why don’t they make these everywhere? Why isn’t there a chain of Jerry’s Main Lunches serving hot messes all across the midwest?

The answer is in the rest of the town: everything that’s going to leave has already left Burlington. The beautiful brick buildings downtown are mostly vacant. The most interesting street is the road out of town.
The Memorial Arena, on the banks of the Mississippi, filled up early. Trump wasn’t speaking until 6pm but by 4.45 the parking situation was grim. Outside the building, the hawkers who follow Trump on the road, event to event, sold T-shirts and buttons, three for $10. “We shall overcomb.” “Cats for Trump, the time is Meow.” “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

Inside, every seat had been taken and the floor filled quickly with a standing room only crowd. Burlington is 10% black. The rally was 99.99% white.

The people who attend political rallies in America are a specific genre of humanity, like the people who stand outside in lines for nightclubs. They know where they’re supposed to go and how they’re supposed to behave when they get there. They have gear.

An elderly lady sat beside me wearing a sequined stars-and-stripes-hat she clearly takes out for just these occasions. “Y’all from Illinois?” she asked. I’m not but I can pass. She goes to all the rallies, she explained. She’s been a Republican her whole life, an active Republican, an Iowa Republican. For 30 years, she’s been in crowds like this one. She plans to go, one time in her life, to the national convention. Like going to see the Stones. When the organizers passed around hand signs reading “The Silent Majority”, she grabbed a dozen so she could pass them around to others.

Cheerful helpful women were half the crowd. Angry and absurd men were the other. They wore T-shirts with whole paragraphs written on them: “I am a United States Military Veteran. I once took a SOLEMN OATH to defend the CONSTITUTION against ALL enemies, foreign and Domestic. Be advised No one has ever relieved me of my duties under this Oath!”

There were cars in the parking lot slathered with bumper stickers. “We the people are 100% FED UP!” “So if guns kills people, I guess pencils miss spell words [sic], cars drive drunk and spoons make people fat.” “I’m straight, conservative, Christian, and I own a gun. Is there anything else I can do to piss you off?” A picture of Obama with “Does this ass make my car look big?” The Republican style for 2016 is angry aphoristic humor. Behind comedy, absurd rage: America is the greatest country in the world but America is falling apart, government is the problem which is why government must solve it.

This was a Trump production so naturally there was a VIP section. A door guarded by bald, unsmiling men, the bouncers who stand forever as the bored sentinels of indifferent celebrity. A swinging door at the side of the stage received and dispensed the best-looking people, the ones with the buffed neutrality of political professionals, the women whose faces have been tautened to a perma pout, the men who get their hair cut before every event.

The woman beside me – Stars ’n’ Stripes Hat – was wearing a pewter elephant pendant. A young girl in a bright orange dress passed out of the VIP entrance wearing an elephant pendant encrusted with diamonds. Elephant pendants were a theme, I noticed, and elephant brooches and elephant rings and elephant T-shirts. They came in all different price points and in all different styles: round elephants reminiscent of French cartoons from the 1960s, and strange pseudo-sexual shimmies, and with 1920s straw boater hats leading parades. There was one kind of elephant you couldn’t find. An elephant that actually looked like an elephant. A realistic elephant might serve as a memento to the hundred elephants killed for their ivory every day. A naturalistic elephant would be inherently environmentalist. The elephants must all be fabulous.

Like any good show, there was a warm-up act. In fact, there are two – three if you count the recitation
of the pledge of allegiance. The first was Tana Goertz, an Iowa woman who had been runner-up on the third season of The Apprentice. “What a good-looking crowd,” she pandered. She vouched for Trump as a woman (“He loves women!”) and as someone who had returned to Iowa (“How could you live in New York City if you didn’t love people?”). She promoted the idea which is at the core of every last thing that Trump does, that simple contact with the man brings prosperity. “When you’re in the Trump train you’re going places!” She walked off to polite Iowan applause. The crowd would probably, all things considered, rather have listened to the Elton John music playing on the speakers instead, but at least she made the effort.....


....The title of Between the World and Me comes from a Richard Wright poem called White Man, Listen! and it was never going to get much whiter or more male than me in the Motel 8 sipping bourbon and beer, on my iPhone, with the Jays and Royals highlights flickering in the background and the thud of the satellite dish factory in the background.
The urgency of the book, the vitality of the historical imagination at play, rose like waves into crests of anger tumbling over their own force. It was all of a piece. And it all made very ferocious sense. Between the World and Me is one of those books that possess the powerful inevitability of a natural phenomenon – as if it accrued out of the ether that surrounds us, a crystalline formation of the outrage that defines the moment. To criticize is beside the point. It’s just there.

To me, the key passage in Between the World and Me, comes after Coates has been on television explaining to the host the desperate consequences of yet another police assassination of a black boy.
I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake.
Right then, reading that passage, I knew that white people were going to love this book. What white people crave – more, they require it, they require it to live – is an alibi from their whiteness, an escape from the injustice of their existence. There are various alibis available depending on how much stupidity you can tolerate. You can say to yourself or to others that black people are stupid and lazy; you can say that you don’t see color; you can call your uncle a racist so everybody knows you’re not; you can share the latest critique of brutality on Twitter with the word THIS; and now you can tell a friend that she really has to read Between the World and Me.
 
Because that Dream of Whiteness, the dream of treehouses and cub scouts that tastes like peppermint and smells like strawberry shortcake, is a perfect alibi. Who lives that dream? Somebody else may live it but not me, not anyone I know, no one I could see in Burlington. That’s a dream that belongs to somebody else. Always to somebody else.

It certainly didn’t belong to the Winegard factory workers who were drifting to their cars at the end of their shift. The whiteness of my existence was my iPhone and the fumes of bourbon and beer, and the game from last night and the tingling in my thigh. The tingling in my thigh was my body – the reality I can’t look at because I’m too afraid of my mortality.

To me, the best question ever asked about race in America has always been the one that James Baldwin asked, when an interviewer wanted to know if he was optimistic or pessimistic about the future of America. “What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place,” he said. “If you invented him, you, the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that.” The obsession of intellectuals over the question of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr active or passive resistance – was moot; the pressing matter was why white people were blowing up churches filled with children." [Read the entire article here]

*Pic from slate.com







51 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:25 PM

    Brilliant piece! Brilliant writer!

    ReplyDelete
  2. White is alright9:27 PM

    There is nothing wrong with being white.

    No other people needs to apologize for their success and achievements.

    No other people needs to feel bad because other people can't comport themselves with dignity and honor.

    White people need to stop feeling guilty for being better.

    You all need to start dealing with reality.

    ReplyDelete
  3. White People9:33 PM

    “What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place,”

    In the end, it was never necessary. We should have picked our own damn cotton. Live here would be a million times better.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yisheng10:13 PM

      @9:33 if you had picked your own cotton your ancestors would have died from Melanoma.

      In other words, your dumb ass wouldn't have been around the post this dumb sh*t.

      Delete
    2. Coerced labor, not cotton was the source of the planters wealth. Once slavery was out of the picture, it took 100 years for automated mechanization to turn it back into a profitable crop.

      Delete
  4. Good night9:40 PM

    "I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake."

    And it dies to the smell of gunpowder and piss, surrounded by decrepit houses with trash-strewn lawns. It is Stop the Violence rallies punctuated with gunfire, flash mobs, and burning quickie marts. The Nightmare is the death of civilization and the descent into the jungle.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous10:11 PM

    - "The police don’t bother you so you don’t notice the police not bothering you. Your children are not confused with criminals." Why is it that melanin tends to directly correlate with criminal activity all around the world, regardless of social status or income?

    - "I am white. They are not. They are vulnerable. I am not." Yes, they are "at-risk." The question is, "at risk" from whom? Living in the New Orleans area, I can't think of a single white-on-black murder, or even an assault, there in the past decade. In America, blacks commit aggravated assault on whites at 200 times the rate that whites commit it on them, and commit murder at 8 times the rate of whites. (Source: DOJ interracial crime stats.)

    - "You know what their number one worry was, according to poll after poll after poll? Muslims. Muslims, if you can believe it." You mean the same peaceful Muslims who have killed over 250 million people (including 80 million Hindus in India / Pakistan alone) in their 1400 year history, and who have committed over 27,000 deadly terror attacks since 9/12/01 alone? (Source: thereligionofpeace.com) Yep, those Muslims. How rayciss of white Americans to be apprehensive of such a peaceful and tolerant group. Muslims created and dominated the international slave trade; whites were the last to join it, participated in it for a relatively brief amount of time, and then became the first to end it. P.S. Ever wonder why you never see a single black person in the Middle East? Muslims castrated their male slaves.

    - "What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place." Speaking of New Orleans, one can occasionally spot bumper stickers on telephone poles there that read "We should've picked our own damn cotton."

    ReplyDelete
  6. White people are stupid as shit. Fact.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Lance Cockstrong11:22 PM

    No doubt Marche is a fine writer, but this piece IMHO is a sanctimonious and judgmental, if eloquent, attempt to absolve his white guilt by castigating the white guilt of the Sanders supporters, conflating it as opposite but equal to the Butt Trumpet cult followers.

    On the other hand, a couple of things I was struck by:

    "It is hard to have a male and white body and to conceive of its weakness." Not if you are paying attention to things like this Flint Wants Safe Water, and Someone to Answer for Its Crisis or this The Lawyer Who Became
    DuPont’s Worst Nightmare


    Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century Contrast with the striking sprituality of Ray Hinton exonerated from death row after 30 years

    Scott Pelley: Are you angry?
    Ray Hinton: No.
    Scott Pelley: How could you not be? Three decades of your life, most all of your life.
    Ray Hinton: They took 30 years of my life, as you said. What joy I have I cannot-- afford to give that to 'em. And so being angry is-- would be giving them--letting them win.
    Scott Pelley: You'd still be in prison.
    Ray Hinton: Oh absolutely. I am a person that love to laugh. I love to see other people smile. And how can I smile when I'm full of hate. And so the 30 years that they got from me, I count today-- I count every day as a joy.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Lilac from the phone12:09 AM

    Wow!:(

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous12:34 AM

    "No other people needs to feel bad because other people can't comport themselves with dignity and honor.

    White people need to stop feeling guilty for being better.

    You all need to start dealing with reality."

    9:27 PM
    =============
    Enslavement of people is an evil act that takes away the 'dignity and honor' of it's victims. It also corrupts the perpetrator who himself is dishonorable and certainly disgraced. He has no dignity and honor.

    Because Whites didn't want to do their own dirty work, they ruthlessly enslaved people to do it for them(you lazy fucks.) Of course, Whites like you had to make 'your laziness' about the 'laziness' of Blacks....you are evil and you are liars).

    Whites who killed off the Indians and enslaved Blacks cannot but have profound shame and guilt-- against their will-- for the evil they did. So, inner karmic fears, shame, guilt, misery and damnation are the consequences for not doing the right thing. The sickness is in YOU, and there is no way for you to get away from yourself and most of all, from God. Face it, no matter how much you 'want' to be rid of your guilt and shame, you can't. You cannot erase it. It's like a tar baby, you are stuck to it for an unknown and unspecified amount of time that only God and karma know if it will end. All any human knows that what Whites did to Blacks in America was profoundly wrong and you are branded as such.

    Human heart and conscience operate on the following truths that every human being has known through the ages:

    "Do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself."--Confucius(500 years before the Golden Rule)

    "That what you hate done to you, do not do to another." --Rabbi Hillel

    "You reap what you sow."--Bible

    "Do unto others what you would have done to you."--Christ

    "If you speak or act with a corrupted heart,
    then suffering follows you as the wheel of the cart follows the beast that draws the cart." --Buddha

    Historically, White Americans have done just the opposite of the above quotes.

    That's why you feel 'guilty'. All phenomena are preceded by the heart, ruled by the heart, and made of the heart. If the heart feels guilty and ashamed, there is a reason for it. Something profoundly wrong has been done against humanity.





    ReplyDelete
  10. "No doubt Marche is a fine writer, but this piece IMHO is a sanctimonious and judgmental, if eloquent, attempt to absolve his white guilt by castigating the white guilt of the Sanders supporters..."

    Yes it is judgemental but he's allowed to be - it's in the rules.

    Other than that, I think you have misjudged what the writer was trying to convey. At no stage does he attempt to absolve his white guilt, in fact he goes out of his way not to.

    **

    "...conflating it as opposite but equal to the Butt Trumpet cult followers."

    Yes, but he's sort of right though.

    Saunders does deal in a lot of empty meaningless platitudes, just as Trump does. His writing sometimes has a little more meat on it's bones, but I suspect that many of his supporters don't come for the meat. They like the empty rhetoric.

    It's a shame democratic socialism does not have a better mouthpiece in America. Yet.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Anon@10:11, may I suggest that you read a book titled All God's Children by Butterworth? It will help with your personal growth. You seem like a person who wants to become a better human being.
    Maybe u can ovecome your "color arousal" issues.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Anonymous8:01 AM


    Political correctness has required we not talk about certain topics and, therefore, have no opportunity or outlet to find a solution for certain problems. This intolerance of honest discussion ties into the liberal's “pretend” strategy.

    Pretend all people are the same.

    Pretend there is never individual responsibility.

    Pretend everyone has the same capabilities.

    This strategy is doomed to failure and guarantees we will have to continue to lower the bar, rather than raise it.

    No wonder Americans are depressed about the future.

    ReplyDelete
  13. "Political correctness has required we not talk about certain topics..."

    Blah, blah fucking blah...

    Name the subjects you are "not allowed" to talk about.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Anonymous8:40 AM

    “Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

    We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education.

    We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all.

    We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality.

    And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”

    ― Frédéric Bastiat

    ReplyDelete
  15. Enjoyed the post. I thought he was going to go into his Torontonian friends entering the border.

    Field, do you have the answer for Baldwin's question?

    ReplyDelete
  16. Anonymous10:35 AM

    Blogger Whitey's Conspiracy said...
    Coerced labor, not cotton was the source of the planters wealth. Once slavery was out of the picture, it took 100 years for automated mechanization to turn it back into a profitable crop.

    1:59 AM
    ==========
    Thank you for this important piece of clarity and understanding when it comes to slavery. No one volunteered to pick cotton, they were forced. Talk about "terrorism", right there is a shameful history of it.

    See anon12:34AM. Do you think the human heart will ever do right? Semms like the history of humanity is quite messy. It seems we know what is right but can't, or don't want to do it. Even in the days of St Paul, even 'he' had trouble doing the right thing:

    "15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing." Romans 7:15-19

    ReplyDelete
  17. "Your intelligence is asleep, or rather it has never been awake...You are a man for whom logic does not exist...You do not hear anything, you do not understand anything...Your are without philosophy, without science, without humanity...Your ability to reason, like your ability to pay attention and make comparisons is zero...Scientifically, Frédéric Bastiat, you are a dead man."

    -- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

    Amen

    ReplyDelete
  18. Anonymous10:39 AM

    Anon8:01am, "Ditto!"....thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Anonymous11:16 AM

    "Whites who killed off the Indians and enslaved Blacks cannot but have profound shame and guilt-- against their will-- for the evil they did."

    If they did, it died with them centuries ago.

    Are you arguing for collective guilt?

    ReplyDelete
  20. Master11:20 AM

    "Historically, White Americans have done just the opposite of the above quotes."

    Idiotic statement that asserts white people are uniquely immoral and all other peoples are saints.

    White America is the most just society that has ever graced the earth.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yisheng11:43 AM

      White America is the most racist, misogynist, amoral, unethical, UNjust, society that has ever graced the earth.

      Field, this post was a GREAT read!

      Delete
  21. "For people who love to dwell in contradictions, the US is the greatest country in the world: the land of the free built on slavery, the country of law and order where everyone is entitled to a gun, a place of unimpeded progress where they cling to backwardness out of sheer stubbornness. And into this glorious morass, a new contradiction has recently announced itself: the white people, the privileged Americans, the ones who had the least to fear from the powers that be, the ones with the surest paths to brighter futures, the ones who are by every metric one of the most fortunate groups in the history of the world, were starting to dying off in shocking numbers."

    perfectly stated

    ReplyDelete
  22. Anonymous11:46 AM

    Whitey's Conspiracy said...
    Coerced labor, not cotton was the source of the planters wealth. Once slavery was out of the picture, it took 100 years for automated mechanization to turn it back into a profitable crop.
    --

    Which is why no one grew any cotton from 1865 to 1965.

    Actually, Whitey, cotton production continued to increase in the century after the civil war.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Cotton was a bust out crop through the 50s. Generations of sharecroppers worked it sunup to sundown to simply survive on ever deeper debt to the landowners. The landowners only prospered if they, like Lyndon Johnson's father in law famously did, routinely cheated his sharecroppers out of their share. The Southern elite never recovered their agricultural wealth. They lived in what Falkner called "genteel poverty" until the post WWII sunbelt boom gave their land development value.

      Delete
  23. Master11:49 AM

    Yisheng said...
    White America is the most racist, misogynist, amoral, unethical, UNjust, society that has ever graced the earth.
    ---

    You should get down on your knees and give thanks every day that your ancestors were brought here as slaves. Had they not, you'd be living in some disease-invested shit hole instead of living in a relative paradise, being supported by white folk who let you pretend you are a scientist.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yisheng2:07 PM

      @1/2 Gook, you know you can't claim the Master title
      because you're only 50% White and judging by the width of your nostrils, NO ONE can tell.

      Delete
  24. Anonymous11:58 AM

    We now have a second in a row Black U.S. Attorney working for a Black U.S. President of 7 years. cCouldn’t we declare, if not “mission accomplished”, at least a short respite from white guilt?

    ReplyDelete

  25. The FieldNegro said...
    I’ve never been to a place as white as Iowa. That’s the honest truth. Whenever I go to America it’s New York or Chicago or Los Angeles


    Yet FieldNegro posts story after story of police abuse in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.

    All those white people and no abuse of Black people?

    Must be something different about the white people in Iowa than the white dumbocrats in Chicago, new york, detroit, baltimore, los angeles, etc.

    ReplyDelete
  26. Congo Roy1:44 PM

    The FieldNegro said...
    I’ve never been to a place as white as Iowa
    ---

    There is nothing wrong with some places in the world being white.

    ReplyDelete
  27. Anonymous1:45 PM

    Whitey's Conspiracy said...
    Cotton was a bust out crop through the 50s.
    --

    If a crop was not profitable it would not be grown.

    ReplyDelete
  28. Interesting piece. It would be interesting if he took a look at Canada. One of my boys, a Yawdie, lives outside of the T-dot and he marvels at us Yankees and our level of resources. I get the same response from sistas and brothas from Cuba and Brasil. They look at all of our organizations that presently and historically fight for blah people. My buddy in Canada says there is no group that can compare to our NAACP, Urban League, Organization of Black Airline Pilots, ect. We have a blah President but when will Canada see a blah Prime Minister? The grass aint always greener nor is it browner. Thing is, as interesting as it is to explore whiteness we know all about it. This would have been much more interesting had it been written by a Canadian Muslim attending the Trump rally had they even been allowed entrance IMHO.

    ReplyDelete
  29. "The title of Between the World and Me comes from a Richard Wright poem called White Man, Listen!..."

    No, the title of Between the World and Me comes from a poem of the same name by Richard Wright. "White Man, Listen!" was Wright's history of slavery and subjugation down through the centuries.

    Otherwise, this was 100$ on-target. Thanks, Field. Cut and paste anytime you want. How would we have read it otherwise?

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  30. Field, just got back from the funeral of one of your fellow Yawdies. UAL pilot and young guy, 33, had a seizure on Dec 25th. Left two little kids. If you want more details I can e-mail you some info. I'm sure you already know there are a lot of Yawdies flying here and a bunch at UAL.

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  31. Affirmative Action Jackson3:06 PM

    PilotX said...
    "We have a blah President but when will Canada see a blah Prime Minister?"
    ---

    How about never? What is the black population of Canada, 5%?

    Do you think that China needs a black President too?

    How has electing an AA president worked out for America?

    Black people are the most deluded folks on the planet.

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  32. I get so fucking sick of these dumb-ass people projecting their lives onto the entire planet as an accurate model of reality for over 7,000,000,000 people. It's disgusting. From the very first paragraph, this writer makes it abundantly clear that the reality this writer is speaking about is this writer's reality. So, this writer lives in a peaceful neighborhood unencumbered by the burden of crime and a heavy police presence; this writer has had a relatively easy go at life, probably a product of middle-class parents or higher, good schools, etc. So this writer attributes that to being white! And not only that, feels that it's wrong to even be white!

    Just suicide, you cunt.

    For fuck's sake, this shit is just vomit-inducing madness. The sheer vanity of it is enough to drive someone batshit. "Hey, I've had a pretty good life. And I'll typecast all colored people as having had shitty lives. And the conclusion I'll draw is that I'm special because I'm white; I was treated better and just gifted shit that non-whites don't receive."

    These fucking wimpy sophists are eaten alive by their own guilt. Look, you assholes, be thankful that you had parents or grandparents who claimed a stake in the world and that you were raised in decent neighborhoods and got good educations. This has fuck-all to do with your being white. Do you think Puffy or LeBron's kids are living Ghetto-D fabuluz in da 'hood and getting harassed by cops? Fuck to the no, you moron! They'll be attending private schools and won't be encumbered by the hassles poor people face.

    "What white people crave – more, they require it, they require it to live – is an alibi from their whiteness, an escape from the injustice of their existence."

    I. Can't. Even.

    1) How in the FUCK does a wealthy white person from Canada get to speak for all white people in the world?

    2) "...injustice of their existence." And you know it's a white person who says shit like this 99.999% of the time. Because I was born into this world having "white" skin, my mere existence is thus unjust.

    This motherfucker don't deserve to live on this planet. Just think: This is the shit that the racist whites he's on about would say about blacks, that they're born wrong. This nonsense isn't self-hate; it's wagon-riding progressive reflex speak, a game of one-upsmanship to see whose sword is the largest when they fall on it in public view and apologize profusely for being born with white skin.

    "Whiteness" is none but an illusion stupid motherfuckers like this keep alive by segregating themselves off from non-whites, pretending that every white has lived his life, and every non-white is under constant harassment. The worst kind of racist.

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  33. Progressivism is Religion without God3:53 PM

    Josh said...
    "The sheer vanity of it is enough to drive someone batshit"

    But it works. It gets people like Field to applaud him, and he can bask in the glow of having his Holiness affirmed by Sainted Blacks.

    In Our own Name we Pray, Amen.

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  34. I will be passing the progressive offering plate. Remember to pay your tithe. You have us to thank for so much.

    Josh, calm down,u are going to get a heart attack. God forbid they take u to a hospital with one of those Negroquestions emergency room doctors.:)

    Pilot,send me a link with some info on that Jamaican pilot who passed away.
    FNBLG@YAHOO.COM

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  35. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  36. Anonymous4:42 PM

    Anonymous Yisheng said...
    White America is the most racist, misogynist, amoral, unethical, UNjust, society that has ever graced the earth.

    [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[

    Perhaps you should look into emigration?

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  37. Anonymous5:09 PM

    "Perhaps you should look into emigration?"

    Good idea, she is obviously unhappy here. Any suggestions of where might be a good fit for Yisheng? She needs to go to a rich country that coddles cognitively-challenged black women and lets them pretend they are studying to be a doctor, one that will be committed to funding this sham for her entire lifespan. It has to be a place willing to support a useless parasite who will despise any society that accommodates her delusions of grandeur and who will never show the slightest bit of gratitude or humility toward her benefactors. It has to be a country so generous and magnanimous that no matter how awful the treasonous and vile vitriol she spews towards it is, it will still continue to pay her bills every month and let her waste valuable space in its academic programs. Most of all, it has to be a country that will never actually require her to do anything, ever.

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  38. FBI Now Investigating Hillary for Public Corruption As Well; Sentiment Rises That There Must be a Criminal Referral

    Catherine Herridge:

    EXCLUSIVE: The FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email as secretary of state has expanded to look at whether the possible "intersection" of Clinton Foundation work and State Department business may have violated public corruption laws, three intelligence sources not authorized to speak on the record told Fox News.
    This new investigative track is in addition to the focus on classified material found on Clinton’s personal server.

    "The agents are investigating the possible intersection of Clinton Foundation donations, the dispensation of State Department contracts and whether regular processes were followed," one source said.
    ...
    Inside the FBI, pressure is growing to pursue the case.

    One intelligence source told Fox News that FBI agents would be "screaming" if a prosecution is not pursued because "many previous public corruption cases have been made and successfully prosecuted with much less evidence than what is emerging in this investigation."


    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/01/11/fbis-clinton-probe-expands-to-public-corruption-track.html

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  39. Anonymous5:49 PM

    "FBI agents would be "screaming" if a prosecution is not pursued because "many previous public corruption cases have been made and successfully prosecuted with much less evidence than what is emerging in this investigation."

    Why would prosecution not be pursued? Hillary Clinton should not be above the law.

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  40. Z Man6:16 PM

    In this case, Hillary has said she wanted to guard her private correspondence. She’s also hinted that she was trying to keep the vast right-wing conspiracy from prying into her affairs via Congressional oversight. These are all relatively innocent explanations. She was justified in breaking the law because her tormentors are big meanies!

    It’s this artful use of distraction that causes me to wonder if her campaign is not just another smokescreen. The FBI would be hard pressed to get the green light to indict her even if she was not running for president. Getting the political class to OK it when she is the front runner for the nomination is highly unlikely. That makes her campaign a force-field to repel a full blown investigation. At least that’s what they are thinking.

    Put another way, Hillary’s campaign is like a staged terror attack to distract from the bank heist going on across town. As long as she is running for office, the Feds are limited in what they can do to her. The bet is the clock runs out on this by the summer as it will be viewed as too politically dangerous. Win or lose, Team Clinton gets away with what amounts to a bank heist.

    Ultimately, that’s what has always worked for the Clintons. The assumption by friends and foes is that they are motivated by power, ideology and politics. Their actions are all in pursuit of office or scoring points against political enemies. Working from that assumption, their enemies always swing and miss because they are aiming at something that is not there.

    The real soul of the Clintons, if you will, is good old fashioned greed. It is a love of money and what money brings that drives them. Politics has always been a means, not an end. In this regard they are not much different from most gangsters. Al Capone enjoyed crime, but crime was not his motivation. He liked living large and crime was the means to that end. if Capone happened to be good at making widgets, he would have done that.

    If the news reports are accurate, it appears the FBI is figuring out that they have an old fashioned heist on their hands. The smart money says they run into a stone wall, but even Al Capone was eventually brought low on the sort of technical violations of the law we are seeing here. This is not the 1920’s where you can hide the books from the Feds. Every cent that flows in and out of that operation can be traced now.

    Still, the Clinton gang is not without its resources. The longer this takes, the less likely it is for the political class to permit a criminal case being brought against her. Imagine Clinton being indicted in June after clinching the nomination. But, events have a way of getting away from even the craftiest people so there’s always hope. The image that brings me joy when thinking of the Clintons is of Bill standing on the porch, a bimbo on his arm, waving to Hillary as she is carted away to the penitentiary.

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  41. Josh said...
    "1) How in the FUCK does a wealthy white person from Canada get to speak for all white people in the world?"

    Some time ago, the New York Times published a list of its most upvoted reader comments of all time — and the winner was a Canadian commenter who set out to explain how much more progressive, and consequently wonderful, Canada is relative to the U.S.

    That this was noticed by their masters, this slight pat on the head from the emperor, resulted in a huge outburst of patriotic Canadian pride.

    In foreign countries, we regularly see protest banners in English, written by Americans and intended for American audiences, whereby if the American writing the protest banner influences the American seeing the protest banner on television, this will redistribute power in the foreign protest country – and, more importantly advance the power of some Americans over others. This is a symptom of the American Empire – which I suggest is better called the Anti American empire.

    Moldbug observed that anti-Americanism is more accurately described as ultra-Americanism. This is because those who rule America despise nothing more than America. You prove yourself in the eyes of those rulers but demonstrating that you hate America for the 'right' reasons. Subjects of the American empire proudly announce that they implement American ideals better than those dreadful Americans in flyover country, and hope for a pat on the head from the New York Times.

    And of course, Americans spend blood and treasure meddling in foreign regions. By and large, the objective of these shenanigans is to install in power in foreign places regimes that hate and despise Americans in flyover country, and eagerly hope for a pat on the head from the New York Times. Hence, better called the Anti American Empire.

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  42. Anonymous7:01 PM

    One day, maybe, white and black troublemakers can stop attributing the Worst motives to the other and recognize that the majority of whites and blacks want the relations between all citizens to be better and day to day work and live together just fine.

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  43. "Some time ago, the New York Times published a list of its most upvoted reader comments of all time — and the winner was a Canadian commenter who set out to explain how much more progressive, and consequently wonderful, Canada is relative to the U.S."

    Yeah, as I observed briefly in my long-winded comment, it's just reflex speak -- a white person slamming all white people as a disease to the planet so that other guilt-riddled white people will praise it as being ethereally and eternally self-aware in its significance, shining a metaphorical light on a contrived state of existence wherein white people who weren't even alive in the Jim Crow era are to bear the entire blunt of the blame for black slavery, Native affairs, and general perceived unfairness around the globe. These are back-patting circle jerks comprised entirely of people who led strictly privileged lives, never wanting for anything, and attributing such not to the hard work and intelligence of their parents but rather a skin color. They grew up in a good place and assume every white person does. And they play directly to an audience with the intelligence of Field and Les Mains knowing it will be championed by white-hating race-baiters looking to lay blame at the feet of hundreds of millions of people for the crimes of a very few long since deceased.

    Field, you lunatic. If this were a black man lamenting blacks for committing crimes and staining all black people, saying their existence is injustice, et al, you'd have this schmuck on the House Negro list in perpetuity and would post a never-ending campaign of cut-and-paste rhetoric against it. It's fucking sickening shit and is only approved of by racists. The guy is calling white people an injustice on the planet, simply because people were born white. This motherfucker thinks this about my 3-month-old niece, my 2-year-old nephew? My brothers and mother and father and all my family? About me? Because of strict happenstance of genetics and being born white, we're born wrong in this motherfucker's eyes, and you black-as-an-ideology racist fuckwits can't eat it up fast enough. It's like getting a steak in prison; y'all gobble it down without chewing in fear you won't get a chance otherwise.

    It is unequivocal race-baiting. And you morons who promote such shit will ultimately reap what you sow. Reality is a vast ocean in which all will inevitably fall.

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  44. Anonymous8:39 PM

    "Field, you lunatic. If this were a black man lamenting blacks for committing crimes and staining all black people, saying their existence is injustice, et al, you'd have this schmuck on the House Negro list in perpetuity and would post a never-ending campaign of cut-and-paste rhetoric against it. It's fucking sickening shit and is only approved of by racists."

    Josh, you still don't get it.

    Only whites can be racist.

    When Blacks, Mestizos, Asians, Jews etc. nakedly pursue their ethnic interests, it is Good.

    When whites don't actively work against their own interests, they are Racist.

    The only way some whites can hope to be Good, is to help in working against white interests.

    Only whites believe in equal rights, racial harmony, and universal values. Other peoples recognize this weakness in whites and exploit it by using the rhetoric of social justice as a weapon.

    What you see as hypocrisy is just tribal loyalty.

    Anti-Racist is Anti-White.

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  45. Lance Cockstrong9:37 PM

    @Purple Cow 6:13 AM

    If I'm misjudging then please enlighten me as to what you think he was trying to convey. Perhaps I should have said assuage rather than absolve, but my takeaway was right wingers in their quiet desperation looking for a cult to follow, liberals as miserable ex hippies trying to re-live the 60's, and of course in between reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' book, the key takeaway for him being - "white people will crave this book as an alibi for their whiteness".

    As for Sanders, I don't know what comes across the pond, but I have yet to observe any empty rhetoric from him. Breaking up financial institutions that are too big to fail. Preventing corporations from shifting profits and jobs overseas. Doubling the federal minimum wage by 2020. Eliminating the cap on taxable income for Social Security. Creating jobs by investing in infrastructure. Taxing Wall Street speculation and using the proceeds to fund free tuition at public colleges. Overturning Citizens United. A comprehensive plan for racial justice (in response to the Black Lives Matter protest). No sucking up to billionaires. No Super-PAC. No "I AM THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME" Butt Trumpet blowhard bloviating. Is this empty rhetoric? I don't think so mate.

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  46. Feel the Bern10:32 PM

    Sanders is a sad old hack who is clueless about 21st century America. Apologizing for saying "all lives matter" is about as craven as it gets. Sanders refusal to even discuss Hillary's violation of the trust of her office by putting classified information on her private server and her criminal peddling of US policy decisions is proof that he is running a fake campaign. Democrats are desperate for a sincere candidate with some principals but he can't even pretend to want to fight for the nomination. He never had any intention of challenging Hillary's coronation.

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