Michael Brown and the language of white racism

Calling Michael Brown a "demon" underscores for me language in the subconscious of a majority of white policemen and a good majority of white people in general that see black men, in particular young black men and teens, as a danger no matter what they are doing. Do you walk on the other side of the street when you see black teen(s) coming towards you?  Do you lock your car doors at a traffic light when a young black man walks in front of your car? Do you do the same when you see white young men? That is not to say that crimes don't occur, but the majority of crimes that occur are white on white and black on black.  It is just our subconscious alerting us  and the fight or flight principal takes over. We could be thinking of absolutely nothing or thinking about buying that new car or when our next break for coffee and donuts is, but our subconscious takes over and anything else but fear freezes and disappears well into the background.

White slave owners had to be fearful any time they were in the midst of their slaves. Thus, they carried weapons and hired violent overseers. And it is this fear which evolved over hundreds of years like any idea that evolves from a small group to the overall population until it becomes so acceptable that to say it is now hard wired in our brains would not be that much of a stretch though in reality it is something that we have to be taught. 

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!  -- South Pacific (you've got to be carefully taught)  

You can do your own simple test. If you are white and the police pass you, do they look at you? If you are black don't you feel all eyes are on you at all times? I've done this test many times. An old white man like me is hardly ever worth a second look or even a first look either from police or store owners or any other person walking towards me. I'm not a subconscious alert mainly because I'm white and look like I'm about to set off to sea like the ancient mariner in a sailing vessel. 

Ferguson, MO, where the black population outnumbers the white population by more than 3-1 I think provoked the subconscious within the individuals of the majority white police force and even today makes them feel the same way the white slave owners felt being among their slaves. The police in Ferguson is the opposite of the population where its white force members outnumber by way more than 3-1 its black force members. This story is not a new story. It is an ancient story older even than the foundation of American slavery. It is fear of the other. Fear of the other in this country  could be understandable if say black people suddenly turned up for the first time in the 21st century. But our histories intertwined, examined and shared should bring us different results by now. This country had a horrific war over slavery.This country marched and protested and many including whites were beaten and killed in the name of civil rights. Jim Crow laws were eventually crushed. Six years ago America elected a black man (51% black BTW) for President.  Yet what is the one result from all of that? Fear of the other persists  and in its extreme form racism (including some white responses to our President) 

What is the language of racism? 

"An integral part of any culture is its language. Language not
only develops in conjunction with society’s historical, economic and political evolution, but
also reflects that society’s attitudes and thinking. Language not only expresses ideas and
concepts, but actually shapes thought. If one accepts that our dominant white culture is
racist, then one would expect our language- an indispensable transmitter of culture- to be
racist as well. Whites, as the dominant group, are not subjected to the same abusive
characterization by our language that people of color receive." (https://www.pcc.edu/resources/illumination/documents/racism-in-the-english-language.pdf) 

I believe subjugated peoples have always been called derogatory names by their oppressors. It's part of the psychological war to give the oppressor the upper hand and to feel as though he is dealing with a lesser being. And conversely I think the subjugated individual internalizes this language and agrees with the oppressor that he is a lesser being in order to find some kind of homeostasis or otherwise he will go mad.  He knows fighting back individually is a thoroughly losing battle. However, when derogatory names don't seem to be enough violence is used.

Does white racism persist here and now even in our language covert as it might be?  You're goddamn right it does though for the most part out of fear of being excoriated in public it doesn't reveal itself until an event such as  a white policeman killing another young black man occurs. Then we hear the cheers for the white policeman and hear of the grotesqueness of his victim. And once again the truth of racial hatred is revealed in the language used to justify that slaying. Demon, he said.

Eight years and counting: My retirement as told through the window of our evolving technology and the demise of great cultural institutions.

I retired on Oct 2, 2006. My final day of work was Sept 29, 2006. I had been a computer programmer, a systems analyst and finally in my last dozen years a technical manager and director. No one at my retirement dinner was checking their pocket devices because at that time there were no smartphones. (Of course today that's all you see in restaurants) Yes, there had been attempts prior to 2006, PDAs, some mobile devices that integrated telephony & data, but not until the iPhone in the summer of 2007 did the explosion of smartphones occur. Android phones soon appeared after the iPhone. And the clam shell phone died (only to be resurrected by a small group of rebellious hipsters.) And Windows phones way after that. And then cometh the tablet. There were text messages you could send with the clam shell phone and Blackberry had the ability to message with QWERTY keyboard but texting wasn't well used then as it is now. 

In 2006 Gmail had almost arrived for everyone but was still invitation only. Twitter could only be accessed by PC/Mac type technology and was hardly used. Up until late 2006, Twitter was mainly a communication application within the Twitter start up. Facebook launched for everyone the week I retired. Till then it was only for university students. So up until that time the best way to communicate with your aunt Tillie or some individual you fancied was by land line, cell phones that were only phones and email or IM on your desktop or notebooks or for that matter by card or letter which would take days or you could pass a note under the door or leave a mash one for someone you liked in the cubicle down the hall. 

In 2006 you still shared music with your fellows mainly by cassette tapes or burning CDs if you could afford a CD burner. Yes there were the peer to peer networks Napster and others but were soon deemed illegal and Bit Torrrent was not widely used yet and was considered controversial. The music

industry was still selling CDs and even cassette tapes were still being sold. Tower records did go out of business in late 2006. Sam Goody stores died around the same time. Best Buy was still selling CDs. Newspapers were already in decline at the time but there were plenty of viable companies and the NY Times cost $1.00. The e-Reader was yet to arrive. So there were books and bookstores still and newspapers and magazines.  Used to be when you got on the subway most people were hidden behind newspapers. 

There were some social networking precedents like Friendster and MySpace and some others though these had more specific maybe more niche like approaches. Myspace was largely a site that was dominated by music groups and fans and Friendster was a rising popular network but ultimately had limited appeal and ultimately declined. Maybe if there had been smartphones at their height of popularity they might have dominated since they had been up and running since 2002. But the world of social networking had not really begun to take over our internet existence. Perhaps you might even say, social networking created our internet existence. Also realize there were no selfies or photobombing or gifs or instagram or vine or snapchats or dick pics or internet bullying and so on. 

There were no net books, no tablets, etc. Microsoft sold a pocket computer but it was fairly useless. There was email. There were corporate intranets and of course the internet and the discussion was about Internet 2.0., the new safer, smarter internet. Still the really big thing that year in 2006 was the Blu Ray DVD player. And to fully enjoy the Blu Ray player you had to have an HD TV. Am I ignoring HD TVs? No, they started cropping up in the early 2000s but boy were they expensive and a little difficult to set up. There was no streaming Netflix service, no Amazon Prime, none of the hundreds of streaming services that exist today. You tube was in its toddlerhood having launched the year or so before, but you needed a computer to watch it not your phone.

In the fall of 2006 I set up my first router and connected with my Gateway XP windows notebook and hard wired my Dell desktop also running XP. The main internet browser was IE. I first started using Firefox then. I think they had a 5% market share. Then along in 2008 came the Chrome browser and together Mozilla and Google made the IE largely a joke. DVR technology was limited and there were court challenges. I did have an iPod that held 5 gigs of data, mainly music. (iPod had been around since 2001.) 

So that was 8 years ago. What will the next 8 years bring? Some new revolutionary way to communicate and share information? Or just bigger smartphones, more tablets, clunkier buggier software. And more hype & bullshit so that the corporations like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon,

Facebook and Verizon etc. continue to dominate the field and are now lacking any kind of startling innovation and continue to make and hog all the money to prevent real technical innovation? We shall see. Meanwhile we've lost bookstores,  newspapers, TV broadcast viewing and most of all our privacy.

An email I sent to friends about the Iraq War and the march I was on March 23, 2003

Dear Folks,

I wonder how people are actually feeling about the push to war in Iraq. Is this really a legal or illegal war? (Can there be an application of such terms to war?) How unprecedented is this assault on what is, for all intents and purposes, still a third world country? After all we have a 400 billion dollar defense budget and Iraq has 1.4 billion dollar defense budget. . . And 50% of Iraq's population is under age 14. . .Is this an attack on children?  Is this a battle of the rich against the poor? Is there a racist component to this war?  Or do you feel as if there is some emotional link for you between the 9/11 destruction and the taking down of Saddam Hussein that gives you some small sense of satisfaction? Can any of us honestly make an open and shut case for or against this current war?

Is anyone who is opposed to this war in any facet guilty of being "unpatriotic?"  (Is patriotism the last refuge of the scoundrel?) Or are those who feel that we have to now fight, since our troops are caught up in it and it would seem untoward to not feel sympathy for them or to not support them, subconsciously "baby killers?"  What do you think of the message being sent by our political leaders who "oppose" the war but still "support" the troops?  Shouldn't we be sympathetic to all the troops?  After all "troops" don't really want to go to war. It's not normal to feel dying is in one's interest. . .

What should we do and say now?  The war has started. The violence is under way. What do we do? Most of our political leaders even if they are opposed to the war are in a state of paralysis and at best are engaged in wishful thinking, believing that we can have business as usual, and at worst they are still manipulating us, our emotions, our beliefs. . .

After participating in yesterday's demonstration down Broadway I was interested to see that in fact this was a true representation of New York City.  Granted the bulk of the people were white 20 and 30 somethings, but for the most part it looked like the same people I travel to work with in the mornings. Every group and category was obviously represented, from small children to the aged.  You could see broad representations of every color of the human spectrum, many individuals wearing definable ethnic clothing. Truly we live in an international city.  Thus in some ways we are the voice of the world.   And that voice stretched from Washington Square to Times Square for almost 5 hours.  Do the actual numbers matter?  It was huge and the reports of "violence" marring the march were overblown as usual by the news media who can't report anything without some kind of contrary view in their goal of "objective" reporting.  Is New York City out of step with the rest of the country?

At first I went to the march feeling a little ambivalent, asking myself what is the point?  The point came to me very simply: This is democracy in action. Democracy is a participatory form of political action. There were no leaders here telling us what to do or what to say. Democracy is not just voting or saying and doing the "right" thing at the convenient time and then sitting down in Starbucks and fretting over the NY Times. Democracy of course is an idea and not a political system.  But we shouldn't give up on an idea that ultimately is the foundation for this nation.  This democracy is a strong message being sent to the (appointed and paid for) leadership of this country that their policy, however it is defined, is wrong!  And that message comes from the city that has suffered the worst from a over half a century of bad US policy, a policy that seems to have an inexorable bent toward empire. If we don't, at the least, practice our rights to be who we are as citizens of this country, we have lost.  All is lost!  That was my ultimate justification for marching yesterday.  That is the most patriotic thing I can do at this time.

But questions remain. What do we do now, today?  How do we proceed in the future? Can marching in the streets ultimately lead to another kind of war?  Are we doomed to repeat history again and again? Are we doing this for future generations?  How do we get back our country?  And finally if the Bush war on Iraq is the war on terrorism would anyone rather take their chances with terrorism? At this point I am still mulling that question over. . .