Obama co-existed, sometimes uneasily, with substitute blackness; picked and chose among instances of surplus blackness; and, toward the end of his presidency, after being forced into it by blood and renewed protests in the streets, came to a truce with subversive blackness.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2016-03-13 23:02Z by Steven

Obama co-existed, sometimes uneasily, with substitute blackness; picked and chose among instances of surplus blackness; and, toward the end of his presidency, after being forced into it by blood and renewed protests in the streets, came to a truce with subversive blackness. But for much of his presidency he preferred, and personified, symbolic blackness: His very success—embodied in the sight of him and his gifted and beautiful black family in the nation’s most stellar public housing—was sufficient to signify black progress, many thought. He could make black folk proud by casually descending the stairs of Air Force One, or inviting black icons like Jay Z and Beyoncé to the White House. Black swag at its best. And something that white Americans who had voted Obama into office could cheer too, desperately hoping to be finally done with the tiring and unsolvable conundrum of race.

Michael Eric Dyson, “Whose President Was He?Politico Magazine, Volume 3, Number 2 (January/February 2016). http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/barack-obama-race-relations-213493.

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Story Of A Criminal

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Law, Media Archive, United States on 2016-03-13 22:55Z by Steven

Story Of A Criminal

The Indianapolis Journal
Indianapolis, Indiana
Sunday, 1894-06-17
page 16, columns 1-2

How Green Goods Men Are Protected by Gotham Police.

Tale of Iniquity Unequaled In the Annals of Municipal Corruption—Testimony of George Appo.

NEW YORK, June 16. During the past week the Lexow committee opened up an entirely new line of inquiry on the subject of police protection to the “green goods” business. The principal witness was George Appo, a half-breed Chinaman, son of Quimbo Appo, who is serving a life sentence in Sing Sing for murder. George Appo Is thirty-six years old and he has been a criminal from his early youth, having spent much of his time in prison. His principal occupations have been picking pockets and “steering guys” for green-goods swindlers.

The testimony of Appo was listened to with unusual attention and interest. The witness is a remarkable person, to begin with, and he described in detail the business of the “green goods” swindlers who have been protected in this city by the police. Appo is the son of a white woman and of Quimbo Appo, the Chinaman who committed a shocking murder in the city years ago and is now serving a term of life imprisonment for the crime. Under the name of George Leonard, the witness was sent to prison when only eighteen years old for picking the pocket of Alfred Gilbert, a custom house inspector, and at that time his photograph was placed In the rogues’ gallery as No. 1441. He had previously served a term in prison, and since then he has been in prison several times.

Appo is a small, wiry man, with dark and sallow complexion, black hair and clean shaven face. He has been a desperado as well as a thief, and there are several ugly scars on his face which tell of bloody encounters. He has a glass eye In place of the right optic, which was shot out in Poughkeepsie two years ago. The police have often spoken of him as one of the worst criminals in the city. His calling in recent years, when he has not been inside prison walls, has been that of a “steerer” for the “green goods” game.

When Appo took his seat In the witness chair, Senator Lexow said to him that he had nothing to fear as to his testimony if he told the truth, but if he did not tell the truth he would be liable to punishment for perjury. In reply to questions by Mr. Goff, the witness said that he was thirty-six years old and was born in New Haven, Conn., but was brought to this city when he was only two months old. He was unfortunate when he was a boy, and he was arrested for picking pockets when he was sixteen years old. He was sentenced to prison for two years and six months by Recorder Hackett, and he was so small at the time that there was not a suit of clothes in the prison small enough to fit him.

Nine months after he had served his time he was sent to prison again for the same offense, the same sentence being passed upon him by Judge Gildersleeve. The third time he was sent to prison for picking pockets he got a sentence of three years and six months from Recorder Smyth. He was caught picking pockets again in 1889, but got off with a year in the penitentiary. He also served a term of seven months in a Pennsylvania jail for picking pockets.

Question by Mr. Goff—Have you been engaged in what is known as “crooked business” in this city? A.—The “green goods” business has been my principal business in late years.

Q.—Please explain to the committee the nature of that business? A.—Circulars are sent out stating that duplicates of the genuine money have been printed from the same plates.

Q.—Well, let us understand who are the persons who are engaged in the business. Who is the backer? A.—He is the old gentleman, the man with the bank roll. He has the real money which is shown as “green goods.”

Q.—Who is the “writer?” A.—He is the man who sends out the circulars.

Q.—And the “steerer,” who is he? A.—He Is the man who goes after the people who come In answer to the circulars.

Q.—You mean the men who are swindled. What is the victim called? A.—He is called the “guy.”

Q.—He comes from the backwoods? A.— Yes, and from the cities and towns all over the country.

Q.—Who is the ‘ringer?” A.—He is the man behind the partition who takes the good money which is shown and puts a brick in place of it.

Q.—And the “turner,” who is he? A.—He is supposed to be the son of the old gentleman. He sells the “green goods” and then places it within reach of the “ringer.”

Q.—Then there is the “tailer,” who is he? A.—He is the one who follows the victim after the game is played and sees him safely out of the city.

Q.—What is the place called where the game is played? A.—The “turning Joint.” It is usually an empty store in which is a desk with a shelf and a partition behind it.

Q.—How are the victims brought to the place? A.—They are directed to go to a hotel in Poughkeepsie or Fishkill on the Hudson River, or to some place in New Jersey about fifty miles from New York, where they are met by the “steerer,” who takes them to this city and leads them to the “turning joint.”

Q.—What division is made of the money taken from the victims? A.—The writer gets 50 per cent, and the backer gets 50 per cent. They pay the other men. The “steerer” gets 5 per cent. The “turner” gets $10 and the ‘”ringer” and “tailer” get $5 in each case.

Q.—How do the “writers” get the names and addresses of persons to whom the circulars are sent? A.—From the mercantile agency lists mostly.

Q.—What do the circulars contain? A.—They say that duplicate issues of money have been obtained, and the victims are asked to answer by telegraph. A bogus newspaper clipping is sent with the circular stating that the money cannot be told from the genuine money. A record is kept of each man to whom a circular is sent. If the record is “John Howard. No. 106,” the man is told to sign a telegram “J. H. 106.” If the writer gets an answer from that man he reports a “come-on.” Then instructions are sent to the man, telling him the hotel to which he must go to meet the messenger.

Q.—Are instructions cent by mail? A.—Yes, but the answers must always be sent by telegraph.

Q.—How are the telegrams sent to the right address? A.—Any address may be given, but the telegraph operators under stand the meaning of the messages and send them to the right address.

Q.—How does the “steerer” know how to meet the right person? A.—He has a password. It may be “speedy return” or “good luck.”

Q.—When the victim is taken to the “turning joint” what is the mode of operation there? A.—A large sum of good money is shown to him as “green goods” and he is allowed to examine it. If he agrees to buy it the “turner” places it in a box or satchel on the shelf behind the desk. The old gentleman sits by as a matter of form, but says nothing. Then the “turner” says he will make out a receipt, and he lifts the lid of the desk, which shuts the box on the shelf from view for an instant. There is a panel in the partition, and when the lid of the desk comes down the “ringer” has changed the box with the money for a box with a brick in it.

Q.—What is done with the victim then? A.—He is sent home with the brick. The “steerer” puts a scare into him and tells him that he must keep quiet until he gets home. He tells him that the country near the city has been flooded with the “green goods” and that he may get fifteen years in jail if he is caught with any of it here. The “steerer” usually carries the box to the station and sees the victim safely on the train, while the “tailer” follows them. When the victims are on the cars again they are allowed to go. They seldom come back. If they do the “tailer” pretends to be an officer and scares them by telling them they can be sent to jail. He tells them that the are as bad as the men who got their money and the best thing they can do is to go back home.

Q.—At what rate is the pretended sale of “green goods?” A.—The least sum take from a victim is $300, for which he is told he is to get $3,000 In “green goods” and also $250 in the same goods for expenses in travel.

Q.—Did you ever know of a victim who came back being taken to a police station to have at scare put into him? A—I know of such a case, but I do not want to in—criminate a friend, and I will not tell about it.

Q.—Tell about it in a general way without mentioning names. A.—I brought a man from Philadelphia on a Sunday morning and took him to a hotel until I could take him to the “turning joint.” He was a marshal from Tennessee and he had been here before, but I didn’t know that then. When I took him to the room where the “turner” was waiting he said he had $80 to invest and wanted $15,000. The “turner” said that the safe was locked and could not be opened, but the money would be sent by express. He showed $85 as samples of the goods. The man took the money, stuffed it into his pocket, pulled a revolver of forty-eight calibre and pointed it at the “turner.” I got the revolver away from him and passed it to the “turner” who ran out. The “ringer” also ran, leaving me alone with the man. I picked up a spittoon, but he drew a bowie knife and cut me across the hand. (The witness displayed a scar in proof of the story.) Then the man ran after the “turner” and caught him in the street, but a policeman took them both to the station. They were both let go at the station and the man went back home. I was not arrested.

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Whose President Was He?

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, United States on 2016-03-13 21:48Z by Steven

Whose President Was He?

Politico Magazine
Volume 3, Number 2 (January/February 2016) [The Obama Issue]

Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of Sociology
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Barack Obama brushed aside the critics who hated him for his skin color—but failed to see the racial confrontation they foretold.

“If I spent all my time thinking about it, I’d be paralyzed,” Barack Obama told me. “And frankly, the voters would justifiably say, ‘I need somebody who’s focused on giving me a job, not whether his feelings are hurt.’”

We were sitting in the Oval Office in the summer of 2010, and I had asked the president about the persistence, since the early days of his 2008 campaign, of viciously racist attacks against him. Millions of ordinary white citizens and right-wing critics didn’t cotton to our first black president’s chutzpah in capturing the highest office in the land—and they have been unleashing venom ever since. Signs at early protests spoke volumes: “Obama’s Plan: White Slavery” and “The American Taxpayers Are the Jews for Obama’s Ovens.” Some played on racist stereotypes: “Obama: What You Talkin’ About, Willis? Spend My Money.” Others tagged him “Traitor to the Constitution” and “Sambo,” or played on his ancestral homeland: “Ken-ya Trust Obama?”

This last message was, of course, a hallmark of the birthers, who formalized racist attacks into a movement by claiming that Obama, despite his Hawaiian birth certificate, was born in Kenya—or that he was really a citizen of Indonesia, or that he had dual British and American citizenship at birth. The sick attempt to paint Obama as un-American—a closet socialist, a secret Muslim and a hater of democracy, no less—didn’t stop there, echoing over the years in the feverish rantings of figures like Dinesh D’Souza, who claimed Obama was motivated by “an inherited rage” against American wealth and power from his anti-colonialist Kenyan father. On TV, Glenn Beck asserted that Obama had “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” while Rush Limbaugh spewed a steady stream of invective on his radio show, from playing a song dubbed “Barack the Magic Negro” to claiming that Obama wanted Americans to get Ebola as payback for slavery. The most infamous birther, Donald Trump, questioned, without basis, not just Obama’s birth certificate, but his college transcript and whether he had truly deserved a spot at Harvard Law School…

Read the entire article here.

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Proud of Obama’s Presidency, Blacks Are Sad to See Him Go

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2016-03-13 19:26Z by Steven

Proud of Obama’s Presidency, Blacks Are Sad to See Him Go

The New York Times
2016-03-12

Yamiche Alcindor

CHICAGO — In his 30s and 40s, the Rev. C.T. Vivian rode with the Freedom Riders, organized sit-ins in Nashville and worked closely with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Many years later, before the 2008 election, he traveled the country along with other civil rights leaders exclaiming to voters that a Barack Obama presidency was exactly the kind of prize that they had been fighting for all their lives.

All of that came back to him during a meeting at the White House three weeks ago between President Obama and several of those leaders. Mr. Vivian told the president how proud he was of him, and how sad he was to see him go.

And then he began to cry…

…But if seven years under President Obama has opened possibilities for black Americans, many of those interviewed were torn about his lasting impact on race relations.

They were, on one hand, hard-pressed to imagine a white president saying “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” inviting the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the white police officer who had confronted him to a White House “beer summit,” or singing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the pastor who was one of the nine black churchgoers gunned down in Charleston, S.C., last year.

“We are losing a soldier who has actually been through the things that individuals are going through,” said Jakya’s father, Jevon Hobbs, 42. “None of the current candidates,” he said, “know what it’s like to be accosted by the police for no reason.”

On the other hand, they said they did not believe a white president would have heard “You lie!” shouted at him from the floor of Congress; or would have had his birth certificate challenged and then seen a man who challenged it become the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination…

Read the entire article here.

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Mixed-Race Politics: Bill de Blasio’s 2013 New York City Mayoral Campaign

Posted in Live Events, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2016-03-13 19:12Z by Steven

Mixed-Race Politics: Bill de Blasio’s 2013 New York City Mayoral Campaign

University of Michigan
Haven Hall, Room 4701
505 State Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Monday, 2016-03-14, 17:30 CDT (Local Time)

Michelle May-Curry
American Culture

Please join the Black Humanities Collective as we workshop a presentation by Michelle May-Curry, a doctoral student in American Culture. Dinner will be served. Though RSVP’s are not required, they are encouraged. Graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty in and outside of the humanities are welcomed to attend.

This paper investigates the ways in which multicultural rhetoric situates black-white mixed-race individuals and their families as a bridge between disparate groups and ideologies. Using Bill de Blasio’s New York City Mayoral campaign in 2013 as a case study, I highlight specific media moments in which de Blasio’s children and his interracial marriage to a black woman are deployed as symbols of political (and by extension, racial) futurity. The key questions of this paper ask: How was mixed-race as a symbol deployed in the de Blasio campaign, particularly in the context of the family? What specifically did mixed-race symbolize in this political sphere? Did de Blasio’s family fight back against essentialized multicultural ideals or simply deploy them to capture the minority vote? In answering these questions I conduct a close reading of de Blasio’s well-known TV advertisement featuring his then 15-year-old son Dante, and put it in conversation with persistent racisms in the form of police brutality, an issue that was central to de Blasio’s campaign. This work engages topics at the intersection of critical mixed-race studies, performance studies, and visual culture, drawing upon and contesting current research that places mixed-race people at the forefront of a changing American demographic and political climate.

For more information, click here.

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How Trump Happened

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2016-03-13 18:53Z by Steven

How Trump Happened

Slate
2016-03-13

Jamelle Bouie, Chief Political Correspondent

It’s not just anger over jobs and immigration. White voters hope Trump will restore the racial hierarchy upended by Barack Obama.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win,” goes the line attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Typically, you’ll find this pearl adorning a classroom or splashed across a motivational poster. But last month, on the eve of Super Tuesday—when a dozen states cast ballots for the Republican presidential nomination—you could find it on Donald Trump’s Instagram page, the caption to a photograph of a massive rally in Alabama the day before.

Perverse as it may seem for the belligerent real estate magnate to channel even apocryphal Gandhi wisdom, the line is apt. First, we did ignore him—as a buffoon who wouldn’t survive past the summer. Then, we laughed at him—as a buffoon who wouldn’t survive through fall. Eventually, Republicans began to fight him, terrified of his traction with voters. Now, he’s winning, with more votes and delegates than anyone left in the field. On the eve of another critical Tuesday slate of votes, Trump is on the verge of an even greater victory. Polls show him in command both in the smaller states that will award their delegates proportionally, and in the larger, winner-take-all prizes of Ohio and Florida. By Wednesday morning, Trump could be a stone’s throw from the Republican presidential nomination…

….Race plays a part in each of these analyses, but its role has not yet been central enough to our understanding of Trump’s rise. Not only does he lead a movement of almost exclusively disaffected whites, but he wins his strongest support in states and counties with the greatest amounts of racial polarization. Among white voters, higher levels of racial resentment have been shown to be associated with greater support for Trump.

All of which is to say that we’ve been missing the most important catalyst in Trump’s rise. What caused this fire to burn out of control? The answer, I think, is Barack Obama

…“The election of the country’s first black president had the ironic upshot of opening the door for old-fashioned racism to influence partisan preferences after it was long thought to be a spent force in American politics,” wrote Brown University political scientist Michael Tesler in a 2013 paper titled “The Return of Old Fashioned Racism to White Americans’ Partisan Preferences in the Early Obama Era.” For Tesler, “old-fashioned racism” isn’t a rhetorical term; it refers to specific beliefs about the biological and cultural inferiority of black Americans. His work suggests that there are some white Americans who, in his words, have “concerns about the leadership of a president from a racial group whom they consider to be intellectually and socially inferior.”…

Read the entire article here.

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Should biologists stop grouping us by race?

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive on 2016-03-13 16:59Z by Steven

Should biologists stop grouping us by race?

STAT: Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine
2016-02-04

Sharon Begley

More than a decade after leading geneticists argued that race is not a true biological category, many studies continue to use it, harming scientific understanding and possibly patients, researchers argued in a provocative essay in Science on Thursday.

“We thought that after the Human Genome Project, with [its leaders] saying it’s time to move beyond race as a biological marker, we would have done that,” said Michael Yudell, a professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University and coauthor of the Science paper calling on journals and researchers to stop using race as a category in genetics studies. “Yet here we are, and there is evidence things have actually gotten worse in the genomic age.”…

Read the entire article here.

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Before People Called Me A Spic, They Called Me A Nigger

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Latino Studies, Media Archive, Slavery, United States on 2016-03-13 16:52Z by Steven

Before People Called Me A Spic, They Called Me A Nigger

Medium
2016-03-11

Pablo Guzmán

It was a throwaway line I used. Deliberately. Speaking to mostly Latino and African-American audiences. Back in the day.

“Before people called me a spic, they called me a nigger.”

And it hit the mark.

The hoots, applause, whistles and laughs let me know. I’d found a nerve. And I intended to probe. When I felt that arrow’s reverb, I launched it again. Aimed squarely at calling out what separates us. Latinos/African-Americans. Even what separates Latinos from ourselves. And. What also ties us together.

Drawing from all my observations. And, experiences (through the ripe old age then of 19. Worldly motherfucker)…

THE SLAVE SHIP.

Square One. For a good many Latinos, African-Americans, and people of the Caribbean, that is our link. To music, dance, cuisine, religion, history. And, a politics to build upon. We may be different shades of black. But we be Black. African. That one drop thing has truth. Now, we are a New World Black. I mean, we ain’t African. Proud of Africa. But we gone through the looking glass. Among Latinos we’re also Spanish and Indigenous. In some Latinos, the impact of slavery is much more pronounced. Among others in the New World, the European blend could be French, or Dutch, or British or Portuguese. The Indigenous element might be Mayan, or Taino, or Incan, or Muscogee, or Carib or scores of others. But the African element. Is like no other.

My parents and I were born in New York City. My grandparents are from Puerto Rico and Cuba. Except for my paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother we are all dark-skinned. “Obviously” of African descent. But that guaguancó gene is lying within practically all Latinos with raíces in Africa. So, you might be light-skinned, and you might marry a light-skinned Latina, but hello! One of your babies might be a nappy-headed rhumbera. Took my people a while to figure out genetics. There was a lot of fighting at first about where that baby came from…

Now, yeah, I’m joshing a bit. But the truth is that in some families, the dark-skinned ones sometimes caught hell. Yeah, that racist self-hate thing permeated everywhere. But the moms and grandmoms especially, circled protectively. Bien conmigo, negrita. Ten cuidao con mi negrito. As Pedro Pietri said in his epic poem Puerto Rican Obituary

Aqui to be called Negrito/Means to be called LOVE”…

Read the entire article here.

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“Kiss me, my slave owners were Irish”

Posted in Articles, Europe, History, Media Archive, Slavery, United States on 2016-03-13 16:32Z by Steven

“Kiss me, my slave owners were Irish”

Medium
2015-03-16

Liam Hogam

As many of you already know, I have engaged with the “we were slaves too!” narrative on multiple forums and platforms for the past few months. Now I plan to explore some of the uncomfortable truths that this mythology tends to obscure. This Saint Patrick’s Day essay will briefly review Ireland’s anti-slavery history before focussing on the more representative and troubling issue of slave ownership among those of Irish descent. What could be more appropriate?

Ireland has a rich anti-slavery history.

Beginning in the fifth century, a former slave to the Irish, Patricius aka Saint Patrick, sent a now famous letter to the Romano-British warlord Coroticus. In this letter, Patricius condemned and excommunicated the soldiers of Coroticus for enslaving his new Christian converts in Ireland and for selling them to non-Christians. This document is one of the earliest anti-slavery texts in existence.

1700s

In the early-eighteenth century, the Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson was one of the first to break with Aristotle’s theory of “natural slavery” by declaring that natural liberty was a natural right that belonged to all. This ever increasing dissemination and development of enlightenment thought, such as Hutcheson’s, helped to influence the rise of a formidable anti-slavery movement in Ireland, particularly in Dublin and Belfast

(i) The ‘Irish’ Slaves

Upon reviewing the various colonial laws pertaining to anti-miscegenation, it is reasonable to conclude that there were voluntary courtships between enslaved black men and free or indentured white women. But the remarkable case of Eleanor Butler illustrates why these unions were rare.

Maryland 1681

Eleanor “Irish Nell” Butler, was an Irish indentured servant who was brought to Maryland by Lord Baltimore in 1661. In 1681 (by then “well free of her indenture”) she choose to marry Charles, who was a black chattel slave. Her punishment for such an indiscretion was that she was to be a slave as long as her husband was alive and that their children were to be slaves. We find that the descendants of Eleanor and Charles were suing for their freedom 100 years later.

But why was Butler punished in this manner? The colonists in Maryland (as in all the other colonies) created racial laws to discourage marriages between white and black, and their 1664 laws stated that

“divers freeborne English women forgettfull of their free Condicon and to the disgrace of our Nation doe intermarry with Negro Slaves”

Lord Baltimore’s remarks to Nell about her fateful decision are revealing of the racism of this era. It is difficult to say if there was anger, concern or bemusement in his voice when he reportedly asked her

“how she would like to go to Bed to a Negro.”

Either way, her defiant reply would have stung..

“I would rather go to Bed to Charles than your lordship.”

Evidently Nell Butler broke the racial line and law out of love not coercion, and it is thus clear that there were rare cases of chattel slaves of Irish descent on their mother’s side.

Conversely, we find that there were many slaves, just like R.R. Madden’s relatives, who had ‘Irish blood’ on their father’s side, i.e. they were the progeny of an Irish slave-master (or his friends or relatives) and his female slave. This is a disturbing chapter that needs to be explored. The rape and sexual abuse of slaves was an infamous practice. Slaves, who were treated as livestock by their white masters and their white supremacist laws, were offered no protection by the State or polity. Slave breeding had become an important consideration for slave owners once the slave trade was banned. Coerced slave breeding between slaves and the rape of slaves by their owners was thus further motivated by the wish to increase the slave population; these slave breeders wanted to extract future capital from present chattel

Read the entire article here.

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