Wigger Lover

"War is getting picked off storming the shore / And war is how the rich conrol the poor"

If you get a chance in the coming weeks and months, please make an effort to see the theatrical documentary Body of War.  The flick has been touring across the States the last few months, and has dates lined up until the start of the Summer.  A trailer to the doc is listed below.

The film chronicles the experiences and day-to-day life of one Tomas Young, an Iraq War veteran paralyzed due to a bullet to the spine he received six days after entering Iraq.  The film shows his political activism as Tomas returns to the States and becomes an anti-war protester.  As historian Howard Zinn wrote, "In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle."  Tomas learns this the hard way as he joins the military after seeing George W. Bush speak at Ground Zero shortly after 9/11 only to learn during training that the planned Iraq invasion has little to do with toppling the structures responsible for the attack.

It is all wonderfully produced, thought provoking, and sure to make you value the ways that you can cause change in your day to day interactions and work.  But, "how" you may ask, "does this relate to wiggers, white privilege, "white folks in black spaces", blackface, pop culture, hip hop, or any of the other topics mentioned here on this blog?"  Well: 

• The film features extensive archive footage of Senator Robert "There are White Niggers" Byrd, as he argues against the War on the Senate floor shortly before the invasion.  In actual interaction with Tomas, Byrd says that the "no" vote on the Iraq war was "the most important of his life. Young helps him read the names of the 23 senators who voted against the war resolution. Byrd reflects: “The immortal 23. Our founders would be so proud.” Turning to Young, he says: “Thank you for your service. Man, you’ve made a great sacrifice. You served your country well.” Young replies, “As have you, sir.”

• Michael Franti's "Light Up Your Lighter" is featured extensively in a scene where Young puts a government received Purple Heart and American flag in his closet.  On the companion double disc CD album are tracks from hip hop heavyweights Lupe Fiasco ("American Terrorist"), Rage Against the Machine ("Guerrilla Radio"), Public Enemy ("Son of a Bush"), Dilated Peoples ("War"), Talib Kweli & Cornel West ("Bushonomics"), and Immortal Technique ("The 4th Branch").  All proceeds from the album go to Iraq Veterans Against the War.

• The film is co-produced and co-directed by Phil Donahue--a man known for over 25 years for bringing "angry" black men (such as Muhammad Ali, Jesse Jackson, and Dr. Khallid Muhammad) into the homes of suburban white folks through television, and letting them speak eloquently and at length on any subject.  For God's sake, the man had 2 LIVE CREW on and performing for a suburban white audience outside of Chicago: 

"Ku" Wear Garment Renaissance

Have you ever wondered where exactly garments worn by the Ku Klux Klan originate?  Or have you assumed that they come from the same "don't ask, don't tell" catalog that provides costumes for Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins?

Well, those pinky commie revolutionaries over at the Mother Jones Photojournalism site have an answer for you.  They recently put up an essay by photojournalist Anthony Karen that documents 58 year old "Ms. Ruth" as she sews hoods and robes week in and week out for her local Klan chapter.

All this talk of designers with racist agendas can bring one to think of Tommy Hilfiger.  A few  years back a popular urban legend circulated the internet saying that Oprah Winfrey threw Hilfiger off of her television show mid-interview after he claimed, "If I had known that Blacks and Asians were going to wear my clothes, I would have never designed them."  All of the above proved laughable when critical thinking was applied to this story .  For instance there was no media coverage, no audience response, no soundbytes, and the anecdote has Oprah taking taking a moral stand to confront a guest.

Still the issue of the hip hop generation pressing designers who target urban and youth consumers is an important one that shouldn't be written off even if you don't catch Mark Ecko in a Michael Richards rant with your cellphone.  The economic and cultural damage done to the Black, Hispanic, and Asian communities (in the U.S. and abroad) alone are enough for fans of these clothing lines to think about purchasing from corporations with a reputation of not using sweatshops, that respect their workers, and don't pollute the environment.

"How to act Black" week. Part 5.

"Most of us rejected the white women’s movement. Miss ann was still Miss ann to us whether she burned her bras or not. We could not muster sympathy for the fact that she was trapped in her mansion and oppressed by her husband. We were, and still are, in a much more terrible jail. We knew that our experiences as black women were completely different from those of our sisters in the white women’s movement. And we had no desire to sit in some consciousness raising group with white women and bare our souls."--Assata Shakur

"How to act Black" week. Part 4.

"The completeness of this transformation appalled me. It was unlike anything I had imagined. I became two men, the observing one and the one who panicked, who felt Negroid even to the depths of my entrails. I felt the beginnings of great loneliness, not because I was a Negro but because the man I had been, the self I knew, was hidden in the flesh of another."--John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me. A book that totally sucks ass.

"How to act Black" week. Part 3.

Before today's video, read excerpts from this essay entitlted, "A Story without Heroes: The Cautionary Tale of Malt Liquor." It's straight miznoronic, yo:

For 20 years, brewers directed malt liquor advertising to white, middle class consumers. But the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's alerted many American businesses to the existence of a group that had been largely invisible to them: black Americans. Prompted partly by social conscience and partly by threatened boycotts, marketers awoke to the wisdom of appealing to black audiences -- hiring black-owned advertising agencies, advertising in media that black people read, watched and heard, and featuring black people in the advertisements. It was the right thing to do and it was the smart thing to do.

…

In the late 1980's, Wessinger heard Hip Hop artists singing about malt liquor in their songs. Singing about Olde English, "O E," now several owners away from its birthplace in Duluth, and about his own St. Ides, "the S.T. Crooked I." But Wessinger did not succumb to corporate thinking, which would have said, "Let's have our ad agency produce radio commercials that sound like this Hip Hop." Wessinger was smarter. He commissioned real Hip Hop stars to create the spots, from the sidewalk up.

The resulting songs, recorded and played in the early 1990's, are the stuff of legend. As one writer noted, they "blew the funk up." Artists included King Tee, DJ Pooh, E-Swift and Snoop Doggy Dogg. The work increased St. Ides sales by 25%, and incidentally made St. Ides the malt liquor of choice among white college students. But black and white malt liquor drinkers were not the only listeners. Almost from the beginning, community leaders and public health advocates were outraged by the lyrics. O'Shea Jackson, rapping as Ice Cube, urged his listeners to, "Get your girl in the mood quicker, get your jimmy thicker, with St. Ides malt liquor."

What a product promise!

...

While some Hip Hop artists were getting paid to sell St. Ides, others were not amused. Carleton Ridenhour, rapping as Chuck D with the group Public Enemy, denounced malt liquor in his song ''One Million Bottlebags.'' His very public stand against malt liquor made the appearance of his voice in a 1992 St. Ides radio spot all the stranger. The producer of a St. Ides ad had sampled a snippet of Chuck D from ''Bring the Noise.'' Even though the spot was withdrawn from airplay as soon as the sampling was protested, Mr. Chuck filed a $5 million lawsuit against the McKenzie River Corporation. ''It's unconscionable,'' noted the rapper's attorney, Lisa Davis. ''He has taken a very strong position against malt liquor, and these ads make him look like a hypocrite.''

...

Mandingo Malt Liquor was marketed as a tribute to the "The Great Mandingo Empire of Mali, 1240-1400" in a can bearing a map of Africa. But students of popular culture might also find it evocative of the 1975 film starring Ken Norton, about a well-muscled slave who is drawn into the thrall, and eventually the boudoir, of his white master's wife. The film gave its name to the phenomenon of white women being attracted to black men, especially if the men are as good looking as Ken Norton. This message-laden potion was brewed by Mandingo Beer Inc, in the state of Pennsylvania, a long way from the kingdom of Mali.

...

But before we cast malt liquor as a racist and calculated attempt to harm minorities, we should recall that two-thirds of the malt liquor brewed in the United States is consumed by people other than African-Americans. Nor are problems with alcohol strictly an urban phenomenon. Didra Brown Taylor's Knowledge, Attitudes, and Malt Liquor Beer Drinking Behavior Among African American Men in South Central Los Angeles presents a review of the literature to date and her own original research. Among the salient findings:

"Contrary to popular beliefs, rural students had equal or higher rates of usage of the two licit substances, alcohol and tobacco, than did urban students. Binge drinking for both male and female rural students exceeded that of their urban peers... rural students are more at risk for the negative consequences of alcohol." (p.36)

"Studies of adolescents consistently find that Black youth initiate drinking at a later age than their White counterparts and have a lower prevalence of alcohol use." (p.18)

"How to act Black" week. Part 2.

Today's clip is a good one from a great 70's television sitcom. Included is a white guy so committed to shed some of his whiteness that he purchases a book on black slang. Meanwhile, Mark Crispin Miller's The Bush Dyslexicon sits lonely on the Amazon sales chart--forever depriving folks of a great argument of how George Bush would be treated if he were black and continued to butcher the English language.

Something that should be taken seriously, in all of this, is the power of literature to heighten someone's social consciousness, or even move them to think (or act) on social injustice outside of one's skin or culture. Literature like this is especially needed in regards to racial inequality and the continued occupation of Iraq. In his essay, ""Protest Literature" historian Howard Zinn commented on the reactions of himself and his students when digesting black poets and writers as white readers:

"There are other situations where we believe we know something but don’t really know it in a visceral way, don’t really know it emotionally, to the point where it moves us to action. White people in the United States always "knew" that black people were discriminated against. Certainly that was true of the white students in my classes at Boston University. But it was only when they read Malcolm X’s Autobiography or Richard Wright’s Black Boy or the poems of Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes that they were confronted by the reality of the lives of black people. They had no idea why black people might be so angry and so were not only confused but also afraid of that anger. The prose of Malcolm X, of James Baldwin, could make them, for the time, feel and understand the anger.

I knew, as a young man, or thought I knew, that black people were treated as inferiors, discriminated against in a hundred ways. One day I picked up a book of poems by Countee Cullen, poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and read a poem called "Incident." In it, he recalls a trip to Baltimore, eight-years-old, sitting on a bus, when a white boy, about his own age, stuck out his tongue and called him "nigger." The poem’s last lines are: "I traveled all through Baltimore, from May until December, but of all the things that happened there, that’s all that I remember." Those lines reached deep inside me, for the first time making me understand what it must be like to feel humiliated because of your color. After all, humiliation, aside from color or any other trivial human characteristic, is a universal experience."

"How to act Black" week. Part 1.

This week will mark the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. To coincide with that, every blog entry this week will feature a Youtube video of a white person learning how act “black” or “street.”

Confused? This quote from James Baldwin’s “An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis” should help shine a small light:

“[A]s long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name...They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in our black church) in their sins —that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us. “

Each entry includes a white television or movie character taking advice from a black friend on how they can shed their whiteness and connect with the inherent coolness or knowledge that comes with being black folk. Amazingly all of these shows were produced before (as comedian Bill Maher says) America had a black friend in Barack Obama.

At this point the best advice all of America can take in relation to the quagmire and boondoggle in Iraq comes from a black friend they were slow to give a Myspace add to, let alone take seriously: Martin Luther King, Junior. As he protested the war in Vietnam in the years before his death, Dr. King warned of “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism”--issues still relevant for the continued occupation of Iraq. In “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” Dr. King eloquently called upon all those seeking change in American foreign policy and daily life by saying, “We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible,” while warning of an America where some believed they had “everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them.”

And yes, a "creative method of protest" can include a rant before a funny Tracy Morgan bit.

"They both ride horses / After 400 years, I've got no choices!"

A few years back right wing columnist/possible former dude Ann Coulter wrote in an essay that "[t]he closest black woman to most of the liberals accusing [Condi] Rice of being incompetent is [their] maid...[Meanwhile the] entire Bush cabinet [looks] like an Image Awards telecast minus the fisticuffs and gunplay." Nevermind that the ignorant cunt confused "Image Awards" with "Source Awards" this is a prevalent belief for conservative writers and Bush apologists. The idea seems to be that since Bush (and Bush Sr.) appointed Clarence Thomas, Condoleeza Rice, and Colin Powell to positions of power these Presidents are more sympathetic to the needs of African Americans than their previous white (and Democratic) administrations.

It may be entirely possible, however, that the Bushies are genetically predisposed to propping up black folks for back breaking work not fit for man or woman. A kickass article up today at DiversityInc.com shows the history of the Bush family in regards to slavery and lynching. While it may prove that Condi Rice wasn't the first House Negro to serve a Bush, folks like Coulter may use this evidence to say the family has always featured employment and justice programs for Blacks.

Slavery Ties: Bush's Long-Held 'Family Secret'

The Bush family owned about 30 slaves 175 years ago in Maryland, reports Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family, on TheRoot.com.

...

[While visiting Africa will] Bush take the opportunity to talk about his ancestors' ties to slavery? Probably not, writes Ball, considering the matter is a long-held "family secret," according to The Bush Tragedy, a new book by Jacob Weisberg, which barely mentioned the Bush family's longstanding involvement in the slave trade.

But in April 2007, the secrets started to leak out. A historian named Robert Hughes discovered census records that revealed five householders of the Walker family, related to Bush through his father's mother, were slaveholding farmers during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, reports Ball.

Bush has talked about slavery on several occasions, including in a 2003 speech on Gorée Island, from which young West African children were shipped to the United States to be enslaved. At the time, he called slavery "one of the greatest crimes of history."

But Bush didn't mention that his ancestors--up to his father's great-great-great grandparents, who owned two slaves--participated in it. Why?

...

It's unclear how much Bush's ties to slavery have influenced his family's political dynasty. No records about the slaves they owned survived, and the evidence available provides no indication the Bush family owned slaves after 1838, which is when the Walker family declared bankruptcy and moved to southern Illinois. How'd the family get the money to start over? They most likely sold their slaves at an auction, but as far as the records indicate, the money trails ends there, writes Ball. But the history remains.

The Bush Tragedy quotes a letter from David Walker, one of the later heads of the current Bush family and a self-proclaimed "believer in eugenics and the 'unwritten law' of lynching," published in the St. Louis Republic in 1914. Walker wrote that Blacks were "more insidious than prostitution and 'all the other evils combined,'" reports Ball.

In 1930, President Bush's great-grandfather bought an old cotton plantation in South Carolina for use as a vacation and hunting getaway where the current president's father, George Herbert Walker Bush, would play as a youth, pampered and waited on by "teams of Black cooks, valets and drivers," according to Ball.

While Ball acknowledges that heirs of slave owners are not necessarily responsible for their past, he says they should be accountable for it. That includes President Bush.

But as the Bush political dynasty ends with one of the worst approval ratings in presidential history amid an unsettled immigration melee, disastrous war and tumultuous economy, no one is surprised he's left it off his agenda while touring Africa.

"If white boys doin it, well, it's success / When I start doin, well, it's suspect"

The bloggers/waste of protoplasm over at Stuff White People Like ("a blog about white people written by white people for other white people that makes fun of white people.") recently ranked Mos Def as #68 on their ramblings:

In the olden days of white culture, people used to look up to Kings and Princes. These were the people that they adored, and every night they wished and hoped that somehow they could wake up and be just like them. But with Royal Families crumbling, that role has been filled by one man: Mos Def.

He is everything that white people dream about: authentic (”he’s from Brooklyn!”), funny (”he was on Chapelle show!”), artistic (have you heard “Black on Both Sides?”), an actor (”he’s in the new Gondry film!”) and not white (”I don’t see race”).

He has done an amazing job of being in big budget movies (The Italian Job) and having one of his songs become a white person wedding staple (Ms. Fat Booty) but still retaining authenticity and credibility.

If you find yourself in a social situation where you are asked to list your favorite actor or artist, you should always say Mos Def. This way you can name someone that everyone has heard of and you don’t look like you are trying to one up anybody. The only possible negative consequence is some white people might think “I wish I had said that first.”

Anyone with a brain can realize that given the treatment Mos gets from the mainstream media, he isn't "loved" by all white people. Their blog entry sort of makes it seem as if there's a bigger "problem" than electing a black man President. They're trying to prevent hip hop kids from putting his face on the $1 bill:

When Punk Goes Crunk Wigger Lover the Blog yells, "Fuck"

So some motherfucker thought this idea would be funny. On April 4th Fearless Records will release a compilation entitled "Punk Goes Crunk" that includes over a dozen modern punk rock bands covering "a whole bunch of [urban styles] from classic hip-hop to R&B to crunk." The press release touts that the CD drops in part because "just everybody is dying to know what hip hop songs covered by white-bred punk kids will sound like."

Just like everybody dies to know what paint chips taste like.

This blog isn't knocking the concept of punk rockers embracing hip hop and rap. Indeed there is somewhat of a historical precedent for that. In the documentary Westway to the World the British punk rock band The Clash are shown visiting the Bronx in the early 80's to live in the same environment that was creating their favorite hip hop records of the time. (As a result they recorded the tracks "Magnificent Seven" and "Radio Clash".) Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten even co-produced a collaboration with Afrika Bambaataa entitled "World Destruction" that melded rock and rap years before Run DMC and Aerosmith's "Walk This Way." And in 1999 punk rockers Bad Religion opened up for the Beastie Boys, Mos Def, and Talib Kweli at a New Jersey benefit for imprisoned Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal.

In a way those heartfelt past fusions of punk and rap aren't that surprising. Both musical styles create a culture that borderlines on the religious for younger followers in dress, speech, and ideology. Both (at times) eschew traditional pop music songwriting constructions for minimalist sonic layers and direct lyrical content. Each feature an internal clash between mainstream artists appealing to escapist fantasies and underground acts dedicated to venting and documenting frustrations with social injustice and political inequality. And you can hear "Fuck Bush" (or some variation) multiple times in 74 minute long compact discs.

But this new shit embodied by Punk Goes Crunk is kind of ridiculous. A struggling punk act now (or the working class white kids they target as fans) would have more in common with lyrics and themes from Dead Prez, Pharaohe Monch, Mr. Lif, The Coup or even the Game than they would from a fucking joke cover of Skee Lo's "I Wish" or Rihanna's "Umbrella." This CD is unheard of by the authors as of now, but odds are it'll comes across like this: