The more I read about political correctness and politically correct behavior, the more I note that the rules are coming from progressive socialist democrats and justified by pointy-head progressive socialist democrat professors who appear to confuse and conflate every action with a deeper psychological or behavioral problem. The end result being that the progressive socialists are able to control the conversation, thwarting the First Amendment, and engaging in Orwellian doublespeak where good is evil, black is white, up is down, and the definition of commonly understood words are perverted beyond their original definition.
The Constitution’s First Amendment guarantees your right to be an asshole, to mock anything and everything …
The First Rule of Blackface: It’s Not Hard to Understand, Everyone -- It's don't wear blackface. The end. Now why is that so hard for some people to remember?
Two troubled souls in Florida – Greg Cimeno and William Filene — decided that it would be “fucking hilarious” to dress up as George Zimmerman and a murdered Trayvon Martin for Halloween. Filene donned a hoodie with blood painted in the center and put on black face paint. His friend Greg put on a T-shirt that said “neighborhood watch.” In the picture that Caitlin Cimeno put up on Facebook, the two men smile and laugh for the camera with Caitlin standing in the middle having a blast. An innocent teenage boy was murderedand these poor excuses for human beings find it reasonable to use his body as the ground upon which to stage their Halloween fun.
Where to start?
- It is not a “rule,” but a commonly accepted communal understanding. The type of understanding where there are “social consequences” for those deviating from the tribal norm.
- As if ignoring the fact that blacks and minorities are some of the most racist people in the land, seeing every action through the prism of race, consider the hypocrisy of a black Eddie Murphy brilliantly portraying an elderly Jewish gentlemen -- in whiteface -- in the hit film Coming to America. All done for laughs – the proximate reason that the two people decided to play Halloween dress up in the first place.
- Look at the progressive characterization of the two celebrants as “troubled souls.” There is no proof that these people were anything other than ordinary citizens wanting to one-up the other consumed celebrants. And yet they are demonized in pejorative terms and referred to as “poor excuses for human beings.”
- An innocent teenage boy was not murdered. Trayvon Martin was not murdered – so said a jury. The facts proffered by the defense tend to indicate that Trayvon Martin was a gangsta’ wanna be with a record of fighting. And that George Zimmerman was a community-minded neighborhood watch member as the police do not patrol private property. The actual evidence shows that Trayvon Martin was most likely either a residential burglar that was found with stolen jeweler and a burglar tool or a receiver of stolen merchandise. If it were not for the media’s mistaken portrayal of Zimmerman as white, the race-baiters and progressives would have not been able to propel this story into national provenience as acause célèbre; thus creating widespread and manufactured controversy.
I don’t know how much more direct I can be in saying this: Do not wear blackface. (Or brownface or yellowface or redface) It’s that simple. To do so is utterly and incontestably racist and needlessly insensitive.
And yes, I used a command. Don’t do it. This is not a question about rights. Human beings have every right to do completely effed up things. But who in their right mind wants to argue for the right to be racist, the right to make a mockery of human life, the right to be an asshole?
Who is this author to “command” your behavior? The First Amendment gives you the right to be “effed up,” racist,” or say or do anything that is not against the law. Did this author not note that we are a tribal people, comfortable with our own kind, and whose behavior is conditioned by the audience and circumstances? Here is another progressive trying to redefine social mores and set the parameters of racism.
Enter the progressive pointy-head professors with their academic mumbo jumbo …
Blackface minstrelsy emerged as a form of mass popular entertainment in this country in the 1830s. Scholars like Benjamin Reiss and others who write about it suggest that white performers donning blackface to perform for white audiences allowed white people to work out their cultural anxieties and prejudices about race, racism, whiteness and blackness.
When white folks paint their bodies black, they demonstrate that they see the black body as a permissive site for the expression of trauma, pain and illicit pleasures. In other words, being in a black body permits them to do everything they are uncomfortable doing in a white body: being lewd and crude, celebrating violence, acting sexually promiscuous, using racial slurs.
This is just one more lie of white racism: that black people are free to do all the things our society hates and demonizes while white people are bound by the strictures of respectability. White pathologization of the black body is classic psychological projection. Everything that there is to abhor about whiteness and white supremacy gets projected onto the black body and becomes a material problem for black people.
[Note: Benjamin Reiss (Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 1997) specializes in 19th-century American literature and culture, with strong interests in the history of medicine, race, disability, and popular culture.]
Excuse me? People have always been tribal in nature and manifesting the proclivity to mock that which they do not understand, that which they do not respect, that which they find absurd, or simply those who are different. To impute deeper motivations to two Halloween revelers – in an unknown state of sobriety – is intellectually dishonest. Most academics are not only out of touch with an earthier reality beyond campus walls, but are forced by their colleagues to keep their discourse “scholarly” even though it may be complete and utter bullshit. By way of scholarly bullshit, here is proof that the subject can be played both ways: white and black …
In 2003 Brazilian theater troupe Choque Cultural (Culture Shock) performed the play, “Pare Para Pensar” (Stop to Think) around the city of Salvador. The play denounces multiple forms of racial violence that plague peripheral communities across Brazil including police violence.Using white masks to allegorize the hegemonic social structures of police aggression, Choque Cultural challenges traditional understandings of racial formation in Brazil by suggesting symbolically that performance, performativity, and enactment play a significant role in the production and maintenance of racial hierarchies. Scenarios of racial contact like police violence,inscribe race onto the body and the landscape, making racial subjectivities coherent. This essay critically engages Choque Cultural’s performance by unpacking the way police violence produces racial meaning through the enactment of racial hierarchy. The troupe’s representation of police contact provides a unique example and metaphor for the ways in which performance (both staged and lived) is central to the construction of racial meaning and imbued with political implications. <Source>
The progressives need to create and demonize a class of “deniers” whether it is global warming or an interpretation of so-called “racial context” …
Now for many people who simply do not want to concede the horror and racism of these acts by Filene and the Cimenos, it would be easy to dismiss this as individual racism, to suggest that these people are clearly jerks, but that their sentiments are not generalizable.
Every year, pictures surface on social media of college kids and regular citizens donning blackface for parties. This is not an isolated incident. It keeps happening and it happens because white people do not actually believe this constitutes an injury to black people. Or maybe they just don’t care.
Constitutes an injury to black people? Excuse me! I do not know what these two people are thinking, but I am willing to bet it had nothing to do with consciously trying to “injure” black people. And, if you want to see real injury, take a look at what the progressive socialist democrats have done with their social engineering and wealth redistribution. The poor is just as poor as when the liberal “Great Society” was established. Except for the billions that went down a black hole (no pun intended) and found that the politicians and their special interest cronies becoming richer and richer. Consider the actual, tangible, measurable injury caused by political correctness and social engineering in implementing the affirmative action; where innocent whites were disadvantaged by the system.
What?
“We’re just having fun,” many of them say. Look, I get the cultural fascination with black skin. The American national imaginary is built on the mythic lore of black otherness – superhuman strength to supply the main labor force of the national economy, men and women with extraordinary sexual desire and prowess, unparalleled athleticism, and a deep anger that leads to a fearsome capacity for violence.
Notice that I said myth. I understand that white folks without access to good anti-racist education might attempt to understand this group of people who are continually subject to the machinations of white supremacy by trying their damnedest to understand what it feels like to be black.
Nobody I know, except the progressive socialist democrats, has a fascination with black skin. And, even that is corrupt as they attempt to create and maintain a perpetual underclass of victims that can be exploited for political purposes. Convincing hyphenated-Americans that they are victims and must turn to the progressive socialist democrats to remedy their individual and collective grievances. Unfortunately, low-information voters hooked on entitlements do not see how they are being exploited, handed substandard education by the progressive socialist democrats and their socialist unions, or contained in inner city ghettos (or barrios) by those who purport to have their best interests at heart. Look at the inner cities ruled, not governed, by the progressive socialist democrats and tell me where is the progress.
What the hell is “good anti-racist education?” Are you telling me that decades of progressive teachers since the sixties have been teaching racism? And, why should anyone believe that a rational person, other than a progressive socialist democrat, is “trying their damnedest to understand what it feels like to be black?”
My suggestion to those people: Just stop. The whole point of white supremacy beyond having a global monopoly on power and domination is that white people are never supposed to feel their race.
In fact, that is my question: How does it feel to be white?
How does it feel to move through the world without being accused, for instance, of “shopping while black”? How does it feel to know police officers are there to help you rather than surveil you? How does it feel to have the full range of your experiences represented on the big and small screen? How does it feel to be the dominant race in the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, almost all 50 governorships, every state legislature in the country and most cities and local governments too?
I imagine that that feels good. Safe. I’m not asking for a perverse descent into white guilt here. I am asking white people to recognize that that goodness and innate comfort that you feel in your own skin, that uncompromised sense of your own humanity is exactly how you are supposed to feel.
I am asking you to recognize that black people and brown and native people are supposed to feel any way other than that.
When you grapple with how it feels to be white, you will be much closer to understanding how it feels to be black.
I don’t think about being white. But, I do think about the progressive socialist democrats and race-baiters who see everything through the prism of race and how to exploit it for best political advantage. I see that these intellectually and morally bankrupt people are perpetuating the type of racism that they so falsely and corruptly decry. I work in an industry where color doesn’t matter, only competence. And, unless you are management, we are all slaves working on the plantation. Interestingly enough, in this meritocracy, you do not meet many incompetents, people who are overtly (I say overtly because you do not know what other people are thinking or feeling) racist, prejudiced, or even political. There are systems to design, code to be written, programs to be tested and integrated. And, only when ugly politics raises it ugly head do we find problems.
There may be no redemption for these foolish racists who clearly have no moral compass. Caitlin Cimeno is no innocent bystander herself. On her Facebook page, she mocked a picture of a little black girl in a T-shirt that said, “Black Girls Rock.” Caitlin intimated that if she “told the truth” using the converse logic that “white girls rock” she’d be called racist. I won’t spend time explaining that any more than I spend time explaining why we don’t have white entertainment television and white history month.
White people are not that obtuse. And the ones who are are willfully ignorant.
Ain’t nobody got time for that. Instead, for those folks who consider themselves enlightened, I will simply say that one of the easiest ways to not be racist this Halloween season is to say no to blackface and tell your less enlightened friends to say no, too.
Black America and the diasporic black world thank you. Source: The First Rule of Blackface: It’s Not Hard to Understand, Everyone | Alternet
First, while these non-public people may be fools, the author has slandered them by calling these private citizens racists and accusing them of a conscious and heinous intent to be racist. Second, the author is guilty of what they accuse others to be – racist. The phrase “Ain’t nobody got time for that.” is clearly a mockery of the speech patterns of lower class citizens who do not use proper English and mocking of the standard speech used by a number of inner city blacks. And third, who is the author to judge who is “enlightened” – one of those charming words found most often in socialist rhetoric as in “enlightened ruling elite necessary to govern unexceptional population units for their own good.”
This is a prime example of how progressive socialist democrats think – and a warning to the rest of us about their self-proclaimed righteousness that is a cover for EVIL! The type of evil that enslaves other people for their own self-serving benefit.
Bottom line …
We are all different in our own ways, and at times may have felt some degree of “otherness.” But this guilt-inducing rhetoric often does more damage to America and its citizens as it creates an “us versus them” atmosphere that is being manipulated for political purposed by the progressive socialist democrats. The progressive socialist democrats are all about political control, setting their own rules – rules that are contrary to the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution by our Founding Fathers. Rules that are destroying America, the best nation on the face of the Earth, and creating just another unexceptional socialist nation ruled by corrupt politicians and the special interests that support them.
When are Americans going to realize they have been played and screwed over by corrupt politicians, the progressive mainstream media, and an educational system infiltrated by our enemies? When are Americans going to realize that we are under assault by our enemies, both foreign and domestic? And, that they have bought the corrupt politicians and the mainstream media?
Wake up before it is too damn late!
-- steve
