Race is a Fickle Thing

I have to say that I've been adequately shocked to see how this issue keeps appearing with its ugly head, about how we have to have a serious discussion about race in America, and what I see the most is hypocricy and double standards.

The first has to do with this cartoon that has gotten a lot of buzz. Do we have to forget that cartoonists portrayed George Bush as a monkey as well for 8 years? Why was no one crying foul over that? The intent was to implicate him as an idiot, so shouldn't we stand up for idiots everywhere and demand that those cartoons be withdrawn too? Do we have to revoke the liberties of the cartoonist and the publisher to print that which is within his first amendment rights to do? Do we forget that it was not our president, but rather Nancy Pelosi who was the main writer of the stimulus package? Here's a shocking forsight of the next four years (at least): any criticism of President Obama will be viewed through a prism of race by the mongerers that want any critics to shut up and sit down. They will comb through every statement, every drawing, looking for the race card to play against anyone who wages any serious opposition against him.

It's one thing to look at the historical accounts that made ready comparison between Africans and apes, but it's another thing to take this cartoon, whose object was the stimulus package (so chock loaded that it seemed to have been written by a monkey...an actual monkey, not a metaphorical one) and its actual author, not the president. This was a cheap excuse to shut up another person who had questions about the judgment of those who wrote and passed the bill so quickly as to stifle discussion.

Perhaps the more disturbing thing is how the NAACP and leaders like Sharpton and Jackson are hounding this guy, who is within his legal rights to express his views, when the R&B and rap communities are committing far more atrocious acts against women of color. Need we forget that Chris Brown recently used Rihanna's face as a punching bag? Or what about the pimped up asshole who shot up Jennifer Hudson's family (and no doubt, had she been there, JHud herself)? We have a community of "artists" who advocate the objectification of women, and those who suffer the most from this are black women. These singers implicate that it's okay to beat your woman, because she's your bitch, and your bitch doesn't have the right to fool around or even look at another man. Meanwhile, she's supposed to be on her knees making sure your happy in all the right places, and then you can go and fuck up the next woman.

Where's the outrage among blacks about how their men are treating their women? Here's a serious discussion about race: white men who beat their wives are publicly humiliated, turned into the trash of society, and tossed out. Why has Chris Brown not received the same treatment? Where is his censure? Why aren't black leaders taking his CD's and trashing them, shouting "this is not how we should be treating our women!"? Now, of course, he has the right to due process, but here's the point: at the very least, the old, and incredibly vocal guard of the race movement in the US is content to allow black men to do what they want to women, but if one non-black so much as questions this, he gets the automatic label of racist?

Fifty years ago and even eighty years ago, black musicians were pioneers, creating some of the best of American music in Jazz and Motown. Of course, behind the scenes, things weren't always beautiful with abuse and drugs happening, but if you listen to Motown lyrics, like Smokey Robinson and the Temptations, you don't hear them about how a woman should service a man. You hear songs like "My Girl", cheesy, yes, but intimate. They're songs where a man shows a woman what love is. Nowadays, we have lyrics that treat women like trash, and artists to boot. Those lyrics are being heard by kids in the inner cities, and guess what? They're being told it's okay for your women to be your whores, and because you're a man, you deserve undying loyalty, money, and a blowjob. Do you want your daughters treated like Rihanna's been treated? Do you want them being told that they should get down and shut up?

If the NAACP really cared about the advancement of colored people, they would see how much of a cancer this types of people are to their movement. They should see how black women are being treated, and maybe, just maybe, they might begin to see why out-of-wedlock pregnancy is not getting any better. Instead of being Barack Obama's personal defense force, perhaps they need to look and see why blacks consistently are less healthy than whites and Hispanics (and even in many cases, American Indians!); why they overall are poorer than other racial groups; and why they have to use race as a defense mechanism.

They call others cowards for bringing race into the discussion, and then when people do, it becomes discrimination. They are overly defensive, and ultimately self-destructive victims. Until they can stand up for real victims, like those black women suffering from early pregnancy, abuse, disease, and objectification, then as far as I'm concerned, their words are completely hollow.