The Automatik

While the Internet is a great way to obtain fast access to a massive amount of information, it’s also a way to obtain access to a lot of ignorant, offensive, bigoted, and disgusting drivel. And those are just the comments on message boards.

Everyone has received forwarded emails which warn against the evils of cancer-causing underarm deodorant or sob stories about poor children suffering from diseases who need your help. These are readily and easily debunked by websites like Snopes.

But some of these forwards are more insidious and dangerous than mere urban legends. Those of us who know better than to believe everything we read delete them quickly and try to forget about them.

Yet we still continue to receive them. So rather than just ignoring them, I thought I’d go through one that came across my inbox recently and discuss exactly why it is insidious, dangerous, and wrong. Please note that I am including many words in this piece that are of an offensive, inflammatory nature. I do this not for shock value or because I like these words, but to show you the original email text in order to explain exactly what it is that I am addressing.

Since the original post discusses Michael Richards and since he has been called out for his words against African-Americans I will only address those parts that refer specifically to African-Americans and even more specifically African-American rights in the United States, such as the right to vote and civil rights.

This email forward uses a lot of words, so I’m going to use a lot of words to debunk it. Whoever wrote this original piece obviously had access to a computer, the Internet, and a dictionary, so with a few mouse clicks one can look up any unfamiliar words or terms, although I’ll try to keep things as clear and simple as possible.

Proud To Be White

Michael Richards better known as Kramer from tv’s Seinfeld, does make a good point. This was his defense speech in court after making racial comments in his comedy act. He makes some very interesting points.

Actually, a quick check of Snopes.com reveals that the following text was not Richards’ defense speech.

As far as we know, Richards did not offer any sort of testimony in a court appearance related to his comedy club outburst. He was invited to attend a mock trial held at Loyola Law School in February 2007 but did not appear at that event.

Furthermore, the term “racial comments” is misleading and far too gentle. Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines the word “racial” as:

1 : of, relating to, or based on a race (a racial minority) 2 : existing or occurring between races (racial equality)

The word “comment” is defined as “an observation or remark expressing an opinion or attitude” or “a judgment expressed indirectly.”

But what did Richards say exactly?

According to Wikipedia and the video clips of the event (shown on the news and easily available on YouTube), here is what took place.

On November 17, 2006, during a performance at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood, California, a cell phone video captured Richards shouting “Shut up” to a heckler in the audience, followed by “He’s a nigger!” to the rest of the audience (using the word 6 times altogether), and also making a reference to lynching. He was addressing a group of black hecklers.

Let’s talk about this. Not dance around it in esoteric terms, but really talk about it.

Calling an African-American or black person a “nigger” is not a “racial comment.” It’s not an observation about race that expresses an opinion. It’s a deeply hurtful insult.

The African-American Registry talks about the history of this word and why it is a hurtful insult.

The history of the word “nigger” is often traced to the Latin word niger, meaning black. . . It is probable that nigger is a phonetic spelling of the white Southern mispronunciation of Negro. No matter what its origins, by the early 1800s it was firmly established as a degenerative nickname. In the 21st century, it remains a principal symbol of white racism regardless of who is using it.

And there’s that other word: racism. Not “racial” but racism.

Merriam-Webster defines “racism” as:

1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race 2 : racial prejudice or discrimination

But that doesn’t sound as horrible as it is in real life. because racism is a lot more than just beliefs, prejudices, and discrimination. One can overcome beliefs, prejudices, and discrimination. What is harder to overcome is a lengthy and deeply entrenched system of social and political institutions that have been created by and which continue to thrive upon negative beliefs, prejudices, and discrimination.

Wikipedia has a long entry on racism, which delves into both institutional and economic racism and eugenics, a “social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention.” If that still seems confusing, consider that eugenics “was also used to rationalize certain aspects of the Holocaust.”

We’re now going past believing someone to be inferior and actually doing something destructive with that belief. If the Nazi Holocaust doesn’t convince you, then please read more about Margaret Sanger and the history of Planned Parenthood.

Because the standard definition of racism doesn’t provide the full depth and scope of its potentially negative impact, more robust definitions have been discussed and adopted.

The Bradford Anti-Racists Project (BARP) website mentions that one of the many definitions of the word racism is:

Racism = Prejudice + Power

Looking up this term results in over a million results on Google. Don’t worry; I won’t go through all of them. It is, however, a valid term frequently used by a lot of people.

So what is prejudice? And what is power?

Prejudice is:

2 a (1): preconceived judgment or opinion (2): an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge b: an instance of such judgment or opinion c: an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race, or their supposed characteristics

It’s interesting that this definition actually sounds more detrimental than the one for racism!

Power has many definitions, but for these purposes the most accurate ones are “control, authority, or influence over others” and “legal or official authority, capacity, or right.”

When those with prejudices also have power it’s an especially dangerous combination because with power, they have control, authority, influence, and often the legal right to inflict harm on others. Rather than go through a world history lesson though, let’s focus on the United States of America.

If you’d read this far, I probably don’t need to inform you that the early settlers in the U.S. were white and European, specifically British. Granted, they felt oppressed by their compatriots back in England for “taxation without representation,” i.e., representation in English Parliament or the right to vote—which is how the United States came into being—but they would not have been able to forge their new homeland into a new country without the enslavement of the hundreds of thousands of Africans that were brought over against their will, beginning in 1619. They were considered property and were beaten, dismembered, starved, raped, and murdered.

How did these white people justify such atrocities? They ascribed inferiority to the Africans (and other peoples of color) both socially and legally.

This is an extremely significant point. The United States of America didn’t come into being until the Revolutionary War of 1776, but for the preceding 150 years or so, it developed through the suffering of those that the settlers considered to be subhuman and according to theologian Cotton Mather “enslaved because they had sinned against God.”

THERE ARE SOME VERY IMPORTANT POINTS AHEAD SO PLEASE PAY ATTENTION.

The citizens and residents of a country that is founded and predicated on such beliefs must continue to champion these beliefs because to do otherwise calls the very existence of the country, not to mention their own rights and freedoms, into question.

This is one of the main reasons that racism continues to exist from not only a legal and social standpoint, but from a moral (or rather immoral) one. This is why it took hundreds of years for slavery to be abolished in the United States; why after the Civil War, African-Americans still did not enjoy the same rights as whites; and why the 15th Constitutional Amendment and several Civil Rights Acts were passed from 1866 to 1991 in the United States, which granted African-Americans everything from the right to vote to the right to drink out of the same water fountains as white people. Not that they were allowed to drink from the same water fountains, mind you, thanks to Jim Crow laws.

NOW BACK TO THE EMAIL.

Someone finally said it. How many are actually paying attention to this?

There is no “finally.” The alleged superiority of whites and inferiority of peoples of color has long been “said” as if it were a social, moral, and legal fact.

There are African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, etc. And then there are just Americans.

Americans are referred to as such by virtue of the fact that they live in America as citizens or residents. Africans did not come to America in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries because they wanted to live in the land of opportunity. They were shackled and forcibly transported. For many descendants of these slaves, it is their African heritage which defines them, providing both context and history, because their American heritage was not gained by choice, forever chained to a horrible legacy of misery.

You pass me on the street and sneer in my direction.
You Call me ‘White boy,’ ‘Cracker,’ ‘Honkey,’ ‘Whitey,’ ‘Caveman’ … and that’s OK.

But when I call you, Nigger, Kike, Towel head, Sand-nigger, Camel Jockey, Beaner, Gook, or Chink …
You call me a racist.

This lists five supposed slurs against white people, two of which include the word “white.” White is not a pejorative in the same sense as black because whites in America, as I have made clear, have long been the group holding the power. To protect and further this power, whites have championed the idea that blacks are inferior and immoral.

Of the second list of slurs, only one refers to African-Americans and that one we’ve already shown to be a historically negative term. And since racism has already been defined as both “belief in superiority” and “discrimination” based on race AND “prejudice + power,” then yes, use of the term “nigger” is racist. And that is not okay.

You say that whites commit a lot of violence against you, so why are the ghettos the most dangerous places to live?

Although slavery was the only instance of “whites commit[ing] violence against [blacks]” discussed above, it is not the only perpetration of racism against African-Americans in the United States. The history of violence committed against blacks by whites has continued long after slavery ended as the existence of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, murders, and the Tuskegee Experiments (to name but a few things) will bear out.

There is nothing included in the original post which supports the claim that “ghettos are the most dangerous places to live” although the implication is that African-Americans kill each other in higher numbers than whites do. The US Department of Justice reports that from 1976 to 2005, “94 percent of blacks were killed by someone of their own race” but so were “86 percent of whites.” The report also notes that “Blacks are disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders.”

However, this does not account for income level. The 2005 study found some changes in crime by income level, specifically that “persons in households with an annual income under $7,500 have higher rates of assault than persons in households with higher income levels.” Statistics also indicate that “over half of the homicides occurred in cities with a population of 100,000 or more” and “almost one-quarter of the homicides occurred in cities with a population of over 1 million.”

This does not prove beyond a doubt that “ghettos are the most dangerous places to live,” but it does present some evidence of a sobering and troubling trend: that they are dumping grounds for “undesirables.” Indeed, the term initiated during the rise of the Nazi Party, when “Germans concentrated the municipal and sometimes regional Jewish population and forced them to live under miserable conditions.”

You have the United Negro College Fund.
You have Martin Luther King Day.
You have Black History Month.
You have Cesar Chavez Day.
You have Yom Hashoah.
You have Ma’uled Al-Nabi.
You have the NAACP.
You have BET.
If we had WET (White Entertainment Television) we’d be racists.
If we had a White Pride Day, you would call us racists.
If we had White History Month , we’d be racists.
If we had any organization for only whites to ‘advance’ OUR lives we’d be racists.

Leaving off the items above which do not directly relate to African-Americans:

The United Negro College Fund was founded on April 25, 1944, by Dr. Frederick Patterson, president of Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), Mary McLeod Bethune, president of Bethune-Cookman College (now Bethune-Cookman University), and others.

In 1944, although slavery had been outlawed for 78 years, African-Americans were still subject to segregation/Jim Crow laws and voter disenfranchisement. It is not a stretch of the imagination to state that the obstacles they faced in getting any education comparable to their white compatriots—much less one that adequately and accurately addressed their role in American history—were daunting, to say the least, and include public school education as well as private.

The first university-level program to address their role did not begin until 1968 at San Francisco State University, after a series of strikes and protests the previous year.

White people had no such restrictions and dominated the curriculum.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is the only African American represented in all of the four federal holidays observed in the United States to commemorate people. Two of the other three people represented—George Washington and Christopher Columbus—are white. The other person is Jesus Christ (Christmas Day), who is frequently depicted as being white, but it has also been suggested that he was Middle Eastern. Clearly “white pride” is represented in disproportionately greater numbers than “black pride.”

Black History Month was originally called “Negro History Month” and began in 1926, again, when African-Americans were excluded from the right to vote. Many African-Americans achieved significant accomplishments throughout history, but unlike white people such as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Alexander Graham Bell, they were (and still remain) virtually absent from the majority history books and are anything but household names. A search for “achievements by african americans” on Google only yields 498,000 results, although there were many African-American scientists and inventors.

The NAACP, or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was created in 1909 at a time when civil rights for African-Americans barely existed.

Television became commercially available in the 1930s and by 1942, there were 5,000 sets in operation. The Nielsen Ratings for television were developed around this time and a listing of the top rated show for each year is dominated by white characters until The Cosby Show in 1986. Clearly the representations of African-Americans in television were severely limited.

BET, or Black Entertainment Television, was created in 1980 and featured programming geared towards African-Americans. However, it was originally a block of programming on USA network and did not become its own channel until 1983. There is no WET, or White Entertainment Television, because whites were the dominant group represented on television at the time. The channel has more recently been severely criticized by many African-Americans as perpetuating harmful stereotypes.

There are organizations for whites to “advance” white lives: the Ku Klux Klan, which advocates white supremacy through terrorism and murder. Since these activities spring from racism, this is a racist organization.

We have a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, a Black Chamber of Commerce, and then we just have the plain Chamber of Commerce. Wonder who pays for that?

A white woman could not be in the Miss Black American pageant, but any color can be in the Miss America pageant.

Again, only addressing the African-American issue, it must be noted that The Miss America pageant began in 1921, but according to Wikipedia, Rule Number Seven stated, “contestants must be of good health and of the white race.”

No African American women participated until 1970, although African Americans did appear in musical numbers as far back as 1923, when they were cast as slaves. Until at least 1940, contestants were required to complete a biological questionnaire tracing their ancestry.

Vanessa Williams was the first African American woman to win the crown in 1984 but resigned because nude photos of her surfaced, although she is still listed as the official winner.

If we had a college fund that only gave white students scholarships you know we’d be racists. There are over 60 openly proclaimed Black Colleges in the US. Yet if there were ‘White colleges’ THAT would be a racist college.

AfricanAmericans.com does list 60 “historically black colleges and universities.” That’s only 60 out of the thousands of regionally-accredited ones in the entire country. Statistics across all colleges show that white college students outnumber African-Americans by eight to one. Thus, most colleges are in fact, white colleges.

In the Million Man March, you believed that you were marching for your race and rights. If we marched for our race and rights, you would call us racists.

Disregarding the subjective context of what the marchers may or may not have “believed,” the Million Man March, originated in 1995, was an event organized to encourage African-American men to register to vote, a right which was only obtained in 1870 and not legally protected from discrimination until 1960, 90 years later. No white people (except women) had to march for such rights because they were already legally granted.

You are proud to be black, brown, yellow and orange, and you’re not afraid to announce it. But when we announce our white pride, you call us racists.

This begs the question: why should people of color not be proud to be members of their race? Why should they be afraid to announce it unless it is to avoid being discriminated against by whites? White pride is associated with the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy. An organization which promotes terrorism and violence against African Americans is nothing to be proud of.

You rob us, carjack us, and shoot at us. But, when a white police officer shoots a black gang member or beats up a black drug-dealer running from the law and posing a threat to society, you call him a racist.

No one disputes that African-Americans commit crimes against white people, and this is statistically proven in links already provided here. What is more disturbing about these statements is the implication that assaults committed by police officers—especially those committed by white police officers against African-Americans—are somehow acceptable or encouraged.

Police officers are not supposed to “beat up” drug-dealers “running from the law” and certainly should not have the authority to shoot gang members (or anyone else for that matter) unless they are under imminent threat of injury or death. No police officer should commit an assault against a citizen who merely “poses a threat to society,” particularly if that threat only exists in the mind of a potentially racist person carrying a weapon. The list of incidents of police brutality on Wikipedia shows many examples of how police officers should not behave. To name but one city in the country, the specific history of violence perpetrated against African-Americans by the Los Angeles Police Department is a lengthy one. (For more on this topic, look up Constance Rice, particularly a recent interview with her in The Sun Magazine.)

I am proud.
But you call me a racist.

Why is it that only whites can be racists?

Since the question is being asked, only whites can be racist because:

Prejudice

PLUS

Power

EQUALS

Racism

People of color have documented prejudices against other people of color, even those within their own racial group. But this is not racism because these people are not beneficiaries of a systemic white power structure.

If you want to know who has the power, follow the money. The majority of CEOs of Fortune 500/1000 corporations are white. This isn’t speculation; this is fact.

There is nothing improper about this e-mail.
Let’s see which of you are proud enough to send it on.

I believe I’ve addressed at least a few of the “improper” aspects of this email.

It is improper, not to mention ignorant and offensive, to suggest that the history of racism in the United States is anything of which white people should be proud, now or ever.

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