Definition: The Realities of Racism

The physical, emotional, social, financial and psychological effects that permeate all aspects of the “dissed,” the victim’s, perceptions and responses to life, for life. In other words, what it feels like, looks like, smells like, and is/does, daily to those who are victims of its insidious, unrelenting, and painful presence impacting every aspect of their lives.

I finally had the opportunity to see the film “The Help.”  “WOW.” How appropriate it is that this weeks’ blog posting serves to gives us another example of the effects of racism from the perspective of the victimized and the insensitive and callous assumptions of the victimizer.

This is posted out of – LOVE – for Michael.

Ignorance of the Realities of Racism and Yet the Arrogant, Self Righteous

White Superiority to Criticize and Condemn

July 24, 2009

To: Nancy Grace and Jane Velez-Mitchell,

CC: Al Sharpton, Larry King, Roland Martin, Rick Sanchez, Soledad O’Brien, Joe Jackson, CNN Producers

(I NEED TO SEND A COPY OF THIS TO Joy Behar)

            I have generally watched your shows and felt the compassion you have felt for victims and people in distress. I have followed your moral outrage and joined in with my own. I visited Aruba three weeks after the Natalie Holloway tragedy and met Beth Holloway standing at a card table in a parking lot with pictures of her daughter talking to anyone who would listen and accepting contributions towards the fund to find Natalie. I and my three friends contributed. When I followed your reports on the case I felt supportive and connected to your opinions as I felt they were well researched and factual. I have now however found your reporting on the Michael Jackson case uniformed and ignorant of reality/facts. As such it comes across as pompous and insensitive to those of us who know and have lived their circumstances. You weren’t Colored and poor in segregated 1950’s Gary, Indiana. So you haven’t walked in his or our shoes.

I have found your assessment, judgment and criticism of Joe Jackson naive. Joe Jackson was a “Colored” man singularly supporting 11 people on the wages of a steel worker without the benefit of food stamps or aid of any kind back in the 1950’s and 60’s. He supported his family in a home they owned, not the projects, that had only two bedrooms and one bath for 11 people. I suggest to you they all grew up sleeping with and sharing the bathroom with everyone and each other, a natural and comfortable lifestyle for Michael. Joe Jackson kept his large family together never abandoning them and gave them the dream of escaping their poverty by pulling themselves up “by their bootstraps” (something we were all preached to do by white America) using their god given talent they all eagerly expressed. In the 1950’s and 60’s there weren’t many colored stars as athletes in baseball, basketball or tennis much less anything else as role models. There were a few entertainers.  Everything was still segregated with doors shut tightly, closed and locked for Coloreds. There was no affirmative action or financial aid to help us go to school or even simple encouragement to progress beyond “Trade School” for Coloreds. We were supposed to only be laborers. There were only the steel mills, the auto factories, the slaughter houses, cleaning houses and being porters or bell hops as career opportunities for his children and the rest of us. He saved them all from that dead end life in segregated Gary, Indiana in the 1950’s. None went to jail. None were killed. None are in poverty. And he is still with his family thinking of ways to keep them all together and living well.

Joe Jackson beat, whipped, and spanked all of his children. Almost all Colored children were disciplined this way in the 1950’s and 60’s. It was possibly a vestige of our parents’ and grand-parents parenting brought with them when they escaped from Jim Crow’ ism of the South back during the great migration North of the 1920’s and 30’s.  They had been beaten, whipped and spanked by their parents as they had learned these discipline methods from old plantation policies. I was spanked and everyone I knew was then. My elderly 70 year old great aunts who babysat me so my parents could work sent me outside to get a switch when I deserved a beating. And we all hated them for it but all my friends from Chicago never went to jail and we made something of our lives because we were taught “limits.” “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” In the 1950’s there was no stigma much less legal terms for date rape, spousal abuse or child abuse. It was simply a part of life that you had no recourse for and it wasn’t judged as abnormal much less illegal in the way it is today. For that matter there was still capital punishment in the schools where we were paddled. Coloreds further were required to be very, very respectful, well-disciplined and to know “their place,” Yessa Sir and Yes Mam. Parents preferred to discipline their children at home rather than have the racist white cops and justice system of the 50’s “discipline” them like they did Henry Louis Gates in 2009. When they couldn’t arrest him for burglary, the original allegation that his identification proved false, they used “unruly conduct” because he was an “uppity nigga” (in his own home that he had paid for by lifting himself up by his own bootstraps to become a world renown professor from Harvard University.)  The cop had to get him for something or be an embarrassed white cop trumped by an “uppity nigga”(he spoke up for himself challenging the “white authority figure”), a five foot six, 59 year old, polo shirt wearing, be speckled, graying Black man (who was obviously dressed classically “Burglar”). (A Black perspective on the incident based upon hundreds of years of history.)

It was also in the 50’s that not 30 miles away from Gary, Indiana in Chicago, that a 13 year old boy, Emmitt Till, was killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman while on vacation with family in the South. All colored people knew his story and fate and all parents sternly warned their children to be polite, look down when spoken to and to know “their place.” “Children were to be seen and not heard.” Henry Louis Gates forgot to do this. He forgot “his place.”

When you criticize Joe Jackson for putting his children on the road, beating them to perfection to become all that they did what would you rather they have become, porters, waiters, cooks and/or housekeepers? They were by god’s anointment, entertainers. If Michaels’s children have his talents then they too should follow the path of their god given talents. What’s wrong with that? What do you consider “good enough” for them and when? Have you investigated the Osmonds? Or other child stars like Brooke Shields to be so condemning of the Jacksons and their success?

Further, “signifying,” playing the dozens was a common practice between Colored people. We joked about each other’s physical size, color, wide noses, nappy hair, etc. There was even a popular song in our community called “Signifying Monkey” performed by a Chicago native, Oscar Brown Jr. You could talk about anybody or anything but somebody’s “momma” which was cause for a fight. My father signified on me calling me black/dark with nappy hair. He explained to me that I was so easily hurt and cried so easily that he had to “toughen” me up, make me strong so that when I went out into the general “white” public I could cope with being called black, ugly, darkie, nigger, spook, etc. without reacting verbally and/or physically, which I could not do. When Joe Jackson responds to questions about how the kids are or Katherine or the family, I suggest that when he says they are strong he is saying that they have been taught how to cope with the negative, abusive, demeaning attacks on their character by the general “white” public, the media. I am waiting for them to be depicted in a cartoon as monkeys. When Jermaine begs for people to leave Michael alone, now in death, I suggest that as he publically and painfully cries, he is TIRED of having to be strong in America. Unfortunately, the Black children in Pennsylvania that confronted racism at the club pool may not have been taught to be strong as it was mistakenly believed to be unnecessary now.

I suggest to you that you speak of and condemn an environment and culture you are clueless of, 1950’s and 1960’s Colored America and for that matter, 2009 African American society. For us Joe Jackson is a hero who against all overwhelming odds and without an education beyond high school directed his family to the Promised Land and beyond. If Michael had still been under his strict guidance he’d probably still be alive and still being told to be a man and to be strong– Be strong against the hate, obstacles, and jealousy of a culture not possessing your talents and spirit, who instituted all forms of barriers against making it possible for you to achieve, and had to witness you do so anyway, far above their expectations or permission.

Please in the future only speak of experiences that you have some knowledge of before commenting, criticizing and condemning. You are way out your element here. I suggest to you in 1950 Joe’s strong macho love is what saved his Colored family from what was our common fate, but instead gave them a future that most others weren’t blessed enough to have someone care enough to battle with them for, and against others for them. He epitomizes for many older Blacks a Black man who cared enough to fight the system rather than abandon his family. He will always take care of all of them as he always has, with the money they all earned as a family from his direction and guidance. He has taken care of Katherine since she was 18 years old, why wouldn’t and shouldn’t she trust him? You have no clue as to the “parenting” strategies my community has had to employ to raise and protect our children to cope with growing up and living in this “free Democracy of America.”

Disappointed with your insensitive and ignorant ranting on a topic that you have no knowledge of and the arrogant presumption that you do and can therefore spout your opinions for thousands to hear, consider and “respect?”

Tired, tired, tired of needing to BE STRONG in America,

Colored, Negro, Afro-American, Black, African American (All of my polite ethnic designations since I was born in 1946 America)

Out of –LOVE– please comment below on what I, you, and each of us can do to lessen the personal effects of racism on all of us. How can each one of us keep our Michael’s, our children, ourselves, and each other from having to experience this pain? (Media)

SOLUTIONS?

• «Previous Post
• Next Post »

---