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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Location

There are so many ways I could hit this photograph with my final thoughts on this photograph. Yet, I keep coming back to two quotes that resonated with me during the whole Lunch with Clinton mess.

The first quote comes from FireDogLake's Hardin-Smith:

liberal bloggers were invited to meet with the former President of the United States to talk about policy initiatives and the Democratic party and politics going into the November elections.

These words resonated because it made no sense to me for any of the bloggers in that meeting to rationalize the omission of the top bloggers of color in the left; especially if these discussions were meant to hammer on what Democrats could do to win the midterms and, down the road, the presidency. Why would these bloggers be silent accomplices to this big tactical mistake? Why in the world would they want to keep the influencers of thousands of connectors within the colored grassroots?

Then I read this quote from Jeralynn Merrit: I enjoyed being with Liza one night in Amsterdam, but FDL is family.

I was so blown by how not just simple, but simplistic and pedestrian the explanation was. The photograh is about "family". Not just in the physical sense of the word, mind you.

Look again at the photograph?

Have you read at least 5 of these bloggers? Take any --MyDD, FireDogLake, DailyKos, Americablog, Mahablog, TalkLeft, Eschaton, The blogging of the President. Tell me, how really different are these bloggers' styles of writing, topics of discussion and brand of ranting?

Armstrong Williams (of all people!) wrote the following in an article called, Diversity, which is about the absence of people of color in the technology fields :

For example, when hiring, bosses may look for those personal traits they associate with their own success. Consequently, they may end up hiring people who look, think and act in a manner similar to themselves. If confronted with a minority applicant who looks, sounds or communicates differently, they may turn these differences into perceived soft skill deficits.

[...]

Unfortunately, this sort of latent discrimination is virtually impossible to prove. Partly because there exists a strong tendency among judges (and sometimes even juries) to favor an employer's interpretation of events. But more to the point, because people in management simply tend to mentor people who look and act and sound like their sons.

What that means is that young, white Americans have traditionally benefited from the availability of mentors to help hone their talents, while minorities, even to this day, suffer from a lack of mentors to identify with and learn from. There is a logical progression: a lack of mentors equals a lack of learning opportunities, equals a lack of advancement, and equals a lack of certain high level positions being filled by minorities. With time, this sort of arbitrary sorting of high and low level employees comes to be regarded by many as the natural way of things

Most of the people, and I would argue for the exception of Jessica Valenti, have had through the last 2 years what amounts to the kind of working relationships Armstrong describes in his essay. They refer to each other's work regularly, refer each other to grants, workshops, conferences and mainstream media opportunities. And they all as a block make decisions on which candidates they are going to be fundraising. As a block, they all work together as one seamless narrative called "the blogs".

That's the problem I see with that photograph.

We have here a picture of suppression. There are experiences taken out of the picture. There are political interpretations and strategizing taken out of the picture. There are whole swaths of voters and electoral percentage points taken out of the picture. There is a whole history and present of political activism within the Democratic Party that has been taken out of that picture.

It is not lost on me that the top black and latino bloggers of the "liberal blogosphere" are not too keen on Hillary Clinton running for president. It is not lost on me either that we describe ourselves as progressives and not as liberals. As you can see, not one of us is in that photo.

Which is why, when I asked the fateful 3 questions,

What does it mean though that there are 20 bloggers invited to this lunch and not one is black or latino? What does it mean for this group of bloggers to be patting themselves on the backs for being with Clinton when they are all in Harlem and not one of them is a person of color? What does it mean for these people to be there and have not one of them raise this issue in their blogs?

I was not just referring to race.

When I asked those questions I was thinking : Why is diversity such a dirty word when it should be considered an integral part of any political practice?
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By the time you read this post, I may be already on my way to Harlem to have lunch with over 30 bloggers of colors in this gorgeous Sunday morning. After the whole Clinton thing (about which I will be posting my final thoughts tonight), Donald Agarrat of Preboot decided it was time to revive the Brown Bloggers meetup Nichelle and I used to put together almost 2 years ago.

And so with a good excuse in hand, la negra had her hair and nails done. La negra, after all, has to look her best because, deep down inside la negra enjoys being a very shallow and superficial person.

Well, so there I am at the nail salon, having survived an eyebrow wax that saved me from looking like Ugly Betty

... and, OMFG, have you seen the show? It totally rocks and I am so writing a review next ... Anyhow ... where was I? Oh ... right ...

So I am sitting there at the pedi chair, enjoying a lovely massage when I hear this woman SCREAMING to the owner (one of two actually, but she was alone yesterday night). This woman was like a vortex of bitchitude because she was charged $11 dollars for an mani and HOW DARE you charge me here more than in other places.

What. The. Fuck.

My jaw dropped.
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Thoughts about the vagaries of voting machines today put me in mind of the mandatory tests used once upon a time--not just in the South either-- to prequalify voter fitness by proving oneself to the government already in power, by passing whatever tests it sees fit to impose on you, without your consent to be governed by test results because you can't vote yet.

Talk about a high stakes Catch-22!
I feel a rant coming on --

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. . . Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.

Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.
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I was at the mall last night. I loathe the mall, and yet, I find myself there fairly frequently. The village where I live has no pharmacy, nothing other than a small convenience store that charges convenience store prices. So all necessities come from the mall and the large grocery store next to it. Thus, my position at a table in the Food Court, eating Subway sandwiches with my daughter for our late dinner.

As usual, I was people watching. The college students are gone, flown like robins in reverse. They’ll return in the waning days of summer, and change the character of this area. Last night, it was locals. And I started noticing something. Virtually everyone was carrying around extra weight. Lots of belly fat. Some of them were so slowed up by the extra weight that they lumbered. I started looking for lean people. There were a few, but as a percentage, it was less than 20 percent.

I know that we’re engaged in a national crisis over American obsesity. We blame television, and our sedentary lifestyles, and the availability of cheap, high-fat food. We drink too much soda. We eat too much candy and potato chips and fast food. We don’t exercise. It’s all our fault. We’re the richest nation on earth and we’re a bunch of slobs. Blah Blah Blah.
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