February 12th is also Abraham Lincoln's birthday. In fact, Lincoln and Darwin were born the same day of the same year. I want to focus on Lincoln in this article. Recently I was, coincidentally, reading some old reference books I have and some things about the Civil War struck me. First off, one thing is clear: Abraham Lincoln, though a great man in his own right, would have been a minor figure in history and a minor, probably one-term, President had it not been for the Civil War. By seceding, the Southern States catapulted Lincoln into history. Lincoln won below 40% of the popular vote. Lincoln's Republican Party won a majority in neither House of Congress. According to The Presidents, edited by Henry Graff, Stephen Douglas felt that had the Southern States not seceded, Lincoln would have been powerless:

...an object of pity and commiseration rather than of fear and apprehension by a brave and chivalrous people.

But that is not what happened. The South DID secede and this gave Lincoln the opportunity to be a great figure in history. And Lincoln certainly rose to the occasion.

The claim that secession had nothing to do with slavery is bunk, mere revisionism by the losing side that didn't want to be tarred forever for defending slavery. Southern secession was EXPLICITLY (though not necessarily exclusively) about slavery. The North did not fight primarily over the issue of slavery, but over preservation of the Union. But for the South, preservation, and even expansion, of slavery was the prime issue for at least 2 decades before the Civil War, and was the main reason explicitly stated for secession. In fact, the issue of slavery almost led to secession more than once before South Carolina finally made good on the constant Southern threat. Slavery was the issue that dominated American politics. Perhaps the South and individual Southerners had reasons other than JUST slavery for fighting. But the single issue that led to secession was slavery. Period. Any other claims are false.
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It is amazing to me that racist, bigoted, xenophobic creeps like David North and Mark Krikorian are taken seriously enough in this country to have their hatred spewed across publications like The New York Times or prime-time news shows. Here's a prime example, just published at the Wonk Rom's Mark Krikorian: ‘Haiti’s So Screwed Up Because It Wasn’t Colonized Long Enough’:

CIS Fellow David North has attacked the idea of waiving TPS fees for Haitian “illegals” who are probably struggling to send every extra penny they have back home right now. Last week North suggested that Haitian refugees would be best culturally absorbed by other Caribbean countries and any refugees accepted by the U.S. should be directed to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which according to North, “have never lifted a finger to help America to resettle refugees.”

I can't even begin with this one! Is this man serious? Whatever happened a lot of those Cubans who left after Castro or during the Mariel crisis? Oh right, they ended up in Puerto Rico. And how about all the Haitians that took to boats and dingies after the fall of Duvalier? Puerto Rico, of course!

The United States actually had thousand of Haitians in immigration limbo and human rights abuse hell during the 1980s after putting them into an internment camp in Fort Allen, one of the oldest military bases in the island. And guess who got to keep all those Marielitos and Haitians during one of the worst recessions we had on the island? Why, of course, Puerto Rico!

It gets better though,


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First of all, where has Tim Wise been all my life? I can't get enough of this man's speeches. Even when I am not 100% in agreement with his theorical framework, the lucidity and simplicity of his exposition is an amazing breath of fresh air over a rather complex and sometimes stale discussions around race, class, privilege and empire. What I most enjoy is the "materiality" of his arguments; how he immerses every observation in historical facts and not emotional or ideological fiction.

Am going to come back to this particular speech for what he says about "state rights" because it will serve me as a jump-off point in another post about abortion rights, state rights and health care reform:

Fast forward to the civil war era. You have rich white folks in the south, where I come from, standing up and admitting that the reason they are willing to seceded from the union, and the only reason they ever articulated publicly ever, was to maintain and extend slavery and white supremacy. Not only where it already existed, but into the newly acquired, that is to say, stolen territories, from Mexico to the west.

Now we lie about it, and say it wasn’t about slavery, and say it was about states’ rights. Yes, the right of the states to keep and maintain slaves, exactly. But back then, they had no shame. So they didn’t try to cover it up. They openly said it. But once again, the rich didn’t want to go do the work, are you kidding? No. They are going to get poor people to go fight for them. And the poor folks didn’t even own slaves.

Now think, how do you get poor people who don’t even own the shirt on their back, let alone slaves, to go fight to go keep your slaves for you? You’ve got to convince them that their skin is more important than their economic interest. Because, think about it. If I am a farmer who has to charge you a dollar a day, or two dollars a week to work on your farm, and harvest that tobacco or pick that cotton, but you can get a black person to do it for free because you own them, whose going to get the job? Not me. In other words, slavery actually undermined the wages and the wage based the economic floor of the typical white working class, or low-income person. But they were told, “If these people are free, they are going to take your jobs.” No fool. They’ve got your job. That’s the point.

And so at some level, working class white people are being harmed by white privilege. Relatively being advantaged, right? Being given a leg up, being given a membership to the club, but in absolute terms, being kept economically subordinated by the very thing that gave then a sense of superiority. How’s that for irony?

I urge to go to MediaEd.org and read the whole speech this clip is based on and wich runs 40± pages long. It's at The Pathology Of Privilege (PDF) found in Tim Wise on White Privilege Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality.

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While doing a quick research on the term "post-racist", I stumbled upon this video clip of a talk by Michael Eric Dyson on the subject. The clip is illuminating and has me chewing on how I would like to use the word.

I haven't decided whether if I agree with Dyson's definition of "post-racist" or not but I find it refreshingly provocative. It has me thinking of the probable parallels with the possible re-application of the term "post-colonial" as in: "post-racial" is to "post-colonial" what "post-racist" is to "post-colonialist".

What do you think? Are we indeed in a post-racial society? Are we indeed in need to strive for being "post-racist" instead?

Think Progress just discovered that the Bush Administration is forcing HPV vaccines on immigrants :

In July, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services quietly amended its list of required vaccinations for immigrants applying to become citizens. One of the newest requirements? Gardasil, which vaccinates against the human papillomavirus (HPV). From the agency’s press release:

CDC’s revised Technical Instructions to Civil Surgeons for Vaccination Requirements require the following age-appropriate additional vaccinations to adjust status to legal permanent resident:

* Rotavirus
* Hepatitis A
* Meningococcal
* Human papillomavirus
* Zoster

This regulation goes directly against the advice of Dr. Jon Abramson, chairman of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices. In Feb. 2007, Abramson said that he and other committee members advised that Gardasil should not be mandatory because HPV is not a communicable disease like chicken pox.
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This post was not supposed to happen this way. I was supposed to give a quick and dirty, "you go girl" to Alisa Valdés Rodriguez for her smackdown of Adam Nagourney and Jennifer Steinhauer. Why? They've written one of the most poorly researched, poorly fact checked, backed by barely just one expert in Caribbean and Latin American history, anthropology or public policy race-baiting piece of drivel about how Latinos will not vote for Obama because they can't relate to his blackness.

In Obama and the Latino Vote, Alisa goes to bat :

The sloppy, inaccurate story goes on for 32 agonizing paragraphs, using the terms “black” and “Latino” as though they were mutually exclusive – which they are not. Historians estimate that 95 percent of the African slave trade to the Americas took place in Latin America.

To this day, the vast majority of people in the African diaspora live south of the U.S. border, in Latin American countries from Brazil to Colombia to Cuba and, yes, even Mexico. The song "La Bamba," in fact, was brought to the Veracruz region of Mexico by Africans enslaved to the Spanish. The song likely has roots in the Bembe (Bantu) culture from what is now the Congo. This is only a stone's throw, geographically, from the Kenya of Obama's father's birth.

How quickly we forget in this country. How brutally we refuse to learn.

The New York Times not only ignores completely the African history of Latin America by positioning "blacks" against "Latinos" as if none of us were both. To do so is enormously irresponsible because it dissolves from public consciousness the fact that African slavery was a crime committed all across this hemisphere, by colonial Europeans who spoke English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. The story also erroneously portrays Latinos as a race unto themselves - an error egregious enough to be stated in our own census bureau's definition of Hispanic as a person "of any race". Including "black".

I was supposed to expand on Alisa by going deeper into the work I have already covered here, most recently with On Why I Hate Hispanic Heritage Month and Blanquito vs. Latino or the Unbearable Lightness of Being Alberto Gonzales. I was supposed to smackdown Nagourney for his complete lack of any understanding of Latin American history, culture and politics.

And then something happened.
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