This is Your Nation on White Privilege

For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a "fuckin' redneck," like Bristol Palin's boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll "kick their fuckin' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot shit" for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in it the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don't all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you're "untested."


White privilege is being able to say that you support the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance because "if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it's good enough for me," and not be immediately disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the "under God" part wasn't added until the 1950s--while if you're black and believe in reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), you're a dangerous and mushy liberal who isn't fit to safeguard American institutions.


White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you.


White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto is "Alaska first," and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she's being disrespectful.


White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you're being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college and the fact that she lives near Russia, you're somehow being mean, or even sexist.


White privilege is being able to convince white women who don't even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a "second look."


White privilege is being able to fire people who didn't support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.


White privilege is when you can take nearly twenty-four hours to get to a hospital after beginning to leak amniotic fluid, and still be viewed as a great mom whose commitment to her children is unquestionable, and whose "next door neighbor" qualities make her ready to be VP, while if you're a black candidate for president and you let your children be interviewed for a few seconds on TV, you're irresponsibly exploiting them.

White privilege is being able to give a 36-minute speech in which you talk about lipstick and make fun of your opponent, while laying out no substantive policy positions on any issue at all, and still manage to be considered a legitimate candidate, while a black person who gives an hour speech the week before, in which he lays out specific policy proposals on several issues, is still criticized for being too vague about what he would do if elected.

White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God's punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you're just a good church-going Christian, but if you're black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you're an extremist who probably hates America.


White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a "trick question," while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O'Reilly means you're dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.


White privilege is being able to go to a prestigious prep school, then to Yale and Harvard Business School (George W. Bush), and still be seen as an "average guy," while being black, going to a prestigious prep school, then Occidental College, then Columbia, and then Harvard Law, makes you "uppity" and a snob who probably looks down on regular folks.

White privilege is being able to graduate near the bottom of your college class (McCain), or graduate with a C average from Yale (W.), and that's OK, and you're still cut out to be president, but if you're black and you graduate near the top of your class from Harvard Law, you can't be trusted to make good decisions in office.

White privilege is being able to dump your first wife after she's disfigured in a car crash so you can take up with a multi-millionaire beauty queen (who you then go on to call the c-word in public) and still be thought of as a man of strong family values, while if you're black and married for nearly 20 years to the same woman, your family is viewed as un-American and your gestures of affection for each other are called "terrorist fist bumps."

White privilege is when you can develop a pain-killer addiction, having obtained your drug of choice illegally like Cindy McCain, go on to beat that addiction, and everyone praises you for being so strong, while being a black guy who smoked pot a few times in college and never became an addict means people will wonder if perhaps you still get high, and even ask whether or not you may have sold drugs at some point.

White privilege is being able to sing a song about bombing Iran and still be viewed as a sober and rational statesman, with the maturity to be president, while being black and suggesting that the U.S. should speak with other nations, even when we have disagreements with them, makes you dangerously naive and immature.

White privilege is being able to say that you hate "gooks" and "will always hate them," and yet, you aren't a racist because, ya know, you were a POW, so you're entitled to your hatred, while being black and noting that black anger about racism is understandable, given the history of your country, makes you a dangerous bigot.

White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism and an absent father is apparently among the "lesser adversities" faced by other politicians, as Sarah Palin explained in her convention speech.

And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren't sure about that whole "change" thing. Ya know, it's just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain…
 White privilege is, in short, the problem.

Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and activists in the U.S., and has been called, "One of the most brilliant, articulate and courageous critics of white privilege.

The Apologists for Chiselers

Give Us a Lecture

On Bailout Economics

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When Wall Street laid an egg in the 1920s to precipitate the Great Depression, the shorn millionaires and double dealers whose uncontrolled greed spread misery and poverty across the land leaped out of tall buildings and slit their wrists.

The good and privileged life was over. Living in disgrace without maids and footmen was not an option.

Today it's easier. They contact the Secretary of the Treasury and by-pass those messier options. They also contact Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve Bank, and the message loud and clear through these distinguished megaphones of high finance was this :

Save our cherished market place and the thrills and payoffs of speculation; forgive the shady off- the- books deals and transfers and the wreckage of millions of mortgages; forgive our brothers who invented those phantom hedge funds; they didn't know what they were doing, which was okay because the investors and the bankers didn’t know what they were doing, either, and the White House didn’t care. Just fix this now and shut up. We’re in danger.

“Who’s in danger?”

America. The world. Wall Street. George Bush’s legacy. The Republican campaign.

“What about those millions of American taxpayers from the towns and farms and the pension plans and the fading value of their houses, the ones who are paying for the wars and the profit obsessions of Wall Street. Are they in danger, too?

Yes, but now we need them more than ever.

“Why is that?”

Because the country is going broke. The dollar has gone to hell. All that stands between the country and another Depression are the pockets of the taxpayers.

“Let’s say the reasons for that are the following: A needless war deceitfully and recklessly sold to the American public, kept alive with a shameless, flag-waving campaign of manipulation calculated to convince Americans they weren’t supporting the troops unless they loved the war. And let’s say American industrialists, some of the corporate pirates and stockholders made millions on the export overseas of hundreds of thousands of American jobs; and let’s say the speculators and investors of Wall Street and some of the bankers went crazy scooping up profits while the political hacks in the regulator agencies of the Bush government played Scrabble and let chiselers make any deal that came in over the transom. And the game went smash when the mortgage market caved in.”

That is correct, the architects of the bailout now before the country tell us. What we need now is speed. We don’t have time to deliberate. The Secretary of the Treasury tells us the economy is on the brink of collapse. We need to railroad this right now. It is so urgent that we have to swallow it without looking twice at what we’re swallowing. The Secretary of the Treasury tells America this is too urgent to allow discussion. Not by the courts. Not by any other agency of the country. It is like what? Well, Iraq.

Trust us. This from the people who have put America on the edge of bankruptcy with wars and threats of wars and by cherry-picking or actually stealing the easy fruit available to them while the regulators of the Bush government dozed or winked.

“But what about protections for the taxpayers? The ordinary people of Americans. Shouldn’t they be protected from the multi-millionare supplicants who have now squeezed themselves to the table en masse and created and unsightly food fight to make sure they get theirs? And if we’re going to be pushed into this de facto socialism to save capitalism, shouldn’t there be some language in there that gives the public a share in the benefits that ultimately accrue?”

The knights from the counting houses say there isn’t time. Pass it now. The way it’s written. Either that or you get the blame for mess the chiselers created.

Call it Democracy in America, 2000 to 2008.

By Jim Klobuchar

PROTEST

To sin by silence, when we should protest makes cowards out of men. Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Finally,The Debate

John McCain blinked. I guess he wasn’t as needed in Washington as he thought. John McCain made reference several times to past Washington ghost Ronald Regan. The debate shown like I thought it would, a lot more people will come to the conclusion he isn’t needed in Washington.
This past evening I joined a lot of Obama supporters at a neighbor's for a debate party. Obama was able to trigger McCain’s anger. America saw how volatile he really is. Obama was in his comfort zone that of a diplomat. We need to connect with all the World Leaders which I feel confident Obama will shine . We Americans are on to the mind games that the Bush Regime has attempted to weave Us into their web. Bush the spider, is no different than the German's Symbol in WWII. GREED ,GREED, GREED is the most common denominator

Torture is un-American

The case against torture of war prisoners that Congress and many of the American public have backed can be easily disproved by the experience of one of our own candidates for President John McCain. He was tortured by the North Vietnamese and forced to confess to being a war criminal and signed a document to that affect when he was a prisoner of war. He lied, of course, to stop the torture. That's the kind of false information we also get and will continue to get by using torturous methods. It's just simply un- American. signed Dick Flor , retired cartoonist

Charges Against Journalists at RNC Dropped; Questions Remain

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Date: September 19, 2008
Contact: Jen Howard, Free Press, (202) 265-1490, x22 or (703) 517-6273

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Local authorities in St. Paul announced today that they will not prosecute journalists who were arrested on misdemeanor charges during the Republican National Convention earlier this month.

"This is an important first step, but many questions remain," said Nancy Doyle Brown from Twin Cities Media Alliance. "We still need answers about why and how journalists got swept up in these arrests in the first place. And more than anything else, we need to ensure that this never happens again. We’ll never know how many important stories never got told because their authors were behind bars, not in the streets."

Nearly two dozen reporters were arrested during the four-day event, including Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and two of her producers, Associated Press reporters, student journalists, and local TV photographers, among others. Other journalists were pepper-sprayed, and reporters with I-Witness were held at gunpoint during a "pre-emptive" police raid aimed at disrupting protesters. The press release from St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman's office noted that the city's attorney will use a "broad definition and verification to identify journalists who were caught up in mass arrests during the convention."

"We’re pleased that the St. Paul authorities ultimately acted to uphold the rights of all journalists -- including those citizens using blogs, cheap cameras and cell phones to report news as it happens," said Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, the national media reform organization. "Our task now is to ensure that our press remains free to report on the events, issues and stories that matter to our country, our communities, and our democracy."

Less than three days after the initial arrests, more than 60,000 people across the country signed on to a letter from Free Press, demanding that Mayor Coleman and local authorities immediately "free all detained journalists and drop all charges against them." These letters were delivered to St. Paul City Hall the day after the convention following a press conference that included local citizens and many of the journalists who had been arrested earlier in the week.

"The news from St. Paul City Hall is certainly welcome regarding the decision to drop charges against journalists who were arrested and cited during the RNC," said Mike Bucsko, executive officer of the Minnesota Newspaper Guild Typographical Union, who spoke at the press conference. "However, it is essential the elected officials in St. Paul and Ramsey County examine the circumstances that led to the needless detention and harassment of journalists to ensure this type of indiscriminate behavior on the part of law enforcement does not happen again."

Local advocates and independent journalists from KFAI Community Radio, National Lawyers Guild, Twin Cities Daily Planet, Twin Cities IndyMedia, Twin Cities Media Alliance and The Uptake were joined by national groups the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, The Newspaper Guild, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Reporters Without Borders, the Society for Professional Journalists and the Writers Guild of America, East, in condemning the unusually harsh treatment by city authorities.

Watch the press conference: http://qik.com/video/270176

McCain in another uproar

McCain in uproar with the greed and careless captains of Wall Street. Fire chairman of the SEC says John. But John why didn't you do this when all this was happening on your watch in the Senate? This is ex post facto, John you are a has been. Recommendation you and Sarah get Cheney's gun and go shoot wolves from the State of Alaska's Helicopter.This would be a good TV spot for the NRA. Bring a case or two of Budweiser it will help improve your aim.