Repeat after me: "Whether clueless or not, liberals can be racists too".

Look, just because a person doesn't wear white robes with white hoods, finds burning crosses appalling, would never scream the words "spik" or "nigger" it doesn't mean they don't have serious issues with people of other races.

And let's just drop the stupidity that voting for Barack Obama somehow has cured whole generations of white Americans from the transgressions of their ancestors, the upbringing of their parents and the culture of imperial white supremacy that would lead an idiot like Chris Matthews to say they forgot Barack Obama was black during an hour of great speechifying.

Chris Matthews may not be a hard-core bigot but he's a racist. Well intention in a bumbling idiot sort of way? Sure. Yet still a racist.

You know what that means? That a lot of you out there may well be one too. You look at Chris Matthews and you say, "but he reminds me of ..." If you don't get that Chris Matthews could be you, then you don't get how pervassive the culture of white supremacy and hence racism is.

Racism is a social and cultural cancer. It is because we refuse to work outside of he bounds of white supremacy that we allegedly can't find a cure. So we say racism, just like cancer, can't be cured. It just goes into remission.
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Sorry to do this, but this bears repeating, even though I posted this a few moments ago at A hungry man is an angry man; a hungry mob is an angry mob | culturekitchen:

we need more black and brown people in medicine, in nursing, in media, in relief and advocacy work. We need more French and Creole and Spanish speaking people in positions of power in the United States. We need to look at how bad immigration laws have cheated this country of the best and brightest of African Diaspora from it's universities, its businesses, it's technology, it's science.

We need to look at the fear-mongering in Haiti coupled with the average demograpics of the relief workers hitting it's ground as a prime example of the systemic racism that is so entrenched and yet so subtle in the United States culture that cannot but help seeing in starving black man or woman with hand out but machete in hand as a big black monster waiting to attack them. We could do better as a country. We could be better as people. We could be building a better multiracial, multiethnic and multilanguage future today if only, if just only, we'd be more weary and aware of the prejudices that holds us back.

Having more blacks and latinos in college cannot just be about upward mobility. Honestly, we have not had upward mobility in years what with wages being stagnant in the US for what some believe has been specific to the last 25 years. We need to see more black and brown faces who are multi-ethnic and polyglot because we need a cultural revolution. Not just in the United States, mind you, but in all of The Americas.

Education doesn't cure people of bigotry but it does minimize it; especially when your teachers, one of the most primary positions of authority in our culture, are black and brown and multilingual. We don't just need them in urban or inner city school, by the way. We need them in suburb and and rural schools. And we most certainly need them in more university departments; especially in more technology and science and research centers.

This doesn't mean though that I propose this as the only answer. Honestly, I believe it is ultimately the wrong one.


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Photo Courtesy of US Navy

The title of this post comes from a tweet by Richard Morse, or as we know him on twitter @RAMHaiti. He's been posting, as his generator and cell phone allow, continuously every 15-20 minutes about the situation in Haiti and what people are reporting back to him from what they see on the streets.

As I look through myh twitter stream I see people and organizations reporting directly from Haiti without any incidents. The tweets are usually S.O.S. alerts, pleas for water/food/supplies, road block or fallin debris alerts and other daily or asking request for survivor information. It's why it's so important that people like Ansel, the journalist of @mediahacker, call the mainstream media (BIgMediaCo or "Legacy Media") for trying to push tabloid writing as factural journalism. From Tell CNN to stop hyping fears of violence in Haiti. For shame.

They started pushing the violence meme the day after the earthquake. I was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer that evening via Skype. Part way through the interview, they cut to their correspondent for a live chat from the airport.

He spoke briefly with Mario Andreso, the chief of Haiti’s national police, who warned of out-of-control violence from all the prisoners who escaped the penitentiary the day of the quake. The CNN reporter repeated the claims uncritically.

When they came back to me, I began to explain that I had walked through the remains of the jail (here’s the video). That many of the prisoners were reportedly shot dead by police as they tried to escape. And that I had not seen or heard of violence so far.

The prison was a hellish place, with almost no medical facilities. Did it contain some genuine thugs? Yes. But it also contained many political prisoners and people who never received a fair trial from Haiti’s flawed courts. These are simple facts that CNN is too happy to overlook. I was quickly interrupted by Blitzer and they went to commercial break.

Haitians on the streets are not worried about the jail. Food, water, fuel, medicine, and shelter is all I hear.

These digital warriors in the trenches who have been reporting facts and not fictions of machete wielding mandingos or children of tonton macoutes are people or organizations such @MyriamFehmiu @karljeanjeune @GlobalVoices @InternetHaiti @carelpedre @fredodupoux @pierrecote @smithjoanna @unicefusa, the always trustworthy @MSF_USA and even the Israeli Defense Forces propaganda machine, @IDFinHaiti.


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Whether he likes it or not, Choire has become enough of a fixture of the post-Gawker online publishing world to be considered part of the New York City media elite. And he's white. So it's no surprise I hurt my eyes rolling them after reading what is obviously intended to be a clever little throw-away post for him in What Were Black People Talking About on Twitter Last Night? | The Awl:
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Jen Baghia over at Twitter (@littlebrownjen) was a bit offended when she saw this show-cased as the photo of the day over at Georgia's Creative Loafing.

My response? My heart's calcified with these kinds of photos. Am so used to being portrayed as just a piece of bulbous ass I have no outrage left. I did say though that I thought it described Latinos in general and that's what I wrote on the photo yesterday. I take it back: I think this is they way they just look at Puerto Ricans in general.

What do you think?