Indian Cricket Player Harbhajan Singh Suspended for Racist Remarks Against Australian Player

The BBC reported that Harbhajan Singh (pictured left) , a member of the Indian cricket team was found guilty of calling Australian cricket player Andrew Symonds a "monkey" during a recent match between the two teams.

Referee Mike Proctor found Singh guilty after a four-hour official hearing. Symonds is the only non-white player on the Australian team, which beat India by 122 runs.

This is not the first time Indian cricket players and fans have vented their frustrations by using racial slurs and gestures against the 32 year-old Symonds, who as born to West Indian parents in England. Singh's suspension comes on the heels of four Indian fans being banned from a one day international match in Mumbai (Bombay) back in October.

Photographs submitted to officials showed fans using monkey gestures when Symonds came up to bat, both Symonds and Australian team captain Ricky Ponting have lodged complaints of gestures and monkey chants by Indians fans in earlier matches - charges Indian cricket officials dismissed as a "cultural misunderstanding".

Singh is no stranger to controversy, besides his offensive on-field behavior he was sharply criticized by Sikh leaders in January 2006 for removing the traditional head-covering worn by Sikh men in an ad for Royal Stag Whiskey.

While the actions of a few fans certainly do not reflect the views of all Indians, on more than one occasion I have personally experienced subtle and overt prejudiced behavior by men of Indian descent driving cabs or working in bodegas here in New York.

Racism is infectious and I think some Indians, who themselves experienced prejudice because of their status in India's notorious caste system, sometimes project their resentment on African Americans in this nation as they all too quickly absorb the negative perceptions that result from the entrenched racism in this country.

Deconstructing Dinesh D'Souza

Politically speaking, writer Dinesh D'Souza has been Rogue for years. But he seems to be veering off the ranch according to reactions to his September 9th Forbes cover story, which among other things, posits the strange theory that President Obama's domestic policies and foreign policy strategy are shaped by what D'Souza describes as Obama's father's "hatred of the colonial system."

Apparently undaunted by the fact that Obama's own book "Dreams of My Father" makes clear the President was left rather disappointed with the man his father became, or that he was absent through most of his formative upbringing, D'Souza delights prominent conservative media pundits and thinkers by dangling proof that Obama is secretly some kind of foreign radical.

MediaMatters.org has completely dissected the text from the D'Souza piece and clearly identified at least ten claims from the article which are either completely false or stand in total opposition to established facts. Like Fox News Channel president Roger Ailes rushing to defend the tactless televised ramblings of Glenn Beck, Forbes stands firmly by D'Souza's error-ridden article.

Is Forbes magazine Going Rouge? The magazine wasn't always so flippant with facts. My father, a college-educated African-American raised in North Carolina during the Great Depression who went on to become a successful corporate professional and political conservative always had Forbes in his den when I was growing up. He was a long-time subscriber and considered it essential reading.

What's peculiar about D'Souza's cover story is that the Forbes brand, while certainly a bastion of the conservative, pro-capitalist economic mindset, seems to have taken a sharp right turn from the standards set by it's founder Malcom Forbes.

In the article D'Souza repeatedly combines his un-evolved conservative slant with a bizarre mix of his own brand of dime-store psychoanalysis and a rather klutzy distortion of the truth in an effort to provide some sort of intellectually substantive justification for Tea Party anger. It's like he tried to whip up some fodder for conservative pundits to use in the weeks leading up to the November election and no one at Forbes even bothered to fact check it.

D'Souza's conclusions from Obama's book "Dreams of My Father" have puzzled a number of journalists who have reported on the books factual errors.

As MediaMatters.org reports, "Everyone else" who read Dreams "saw Obama burning with disappointment in Barack Sr. In a September 13th review of D'Souza's forthcoming book, Slate.com's David Weigel wrote, "While everyone else read Dreams From My Father and saw Obama burning with disappointment in Barack Sr., D'Souza sees a man burning with 'hatred derived from the debris of the anti-colonial wars.'"

Media Matters also reports that Ryan Chittum described D'Souza's new book as "a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia." in the September 13th issue of the Columbia Journalism Review

But anyone remotely familiar with Dinesh D'Souza's writings and background can hardly be surprised that he's written an error-laden piece trashing the President.

D'Souza's simplistic antiquated observations of African-American culture have long pegged him as being right up there with Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin in terms of conservative media superstars long on wind and short on intellectual substance.

In D'Souza's book The End of Racism, he demonstrated an alarmingly uninformed grasp of American history by making the claim that the "American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well."

He wrote a book blaming liberals for the 911 attacks.

But who is he really?

D'Souza is an immigrant from Mumbai, Matashra, India who arrived in the United States in 1978.

Raised in conservative Arizona, according to a 2007 Boston Globe article by Peter Canellos, D'Souza first grabbed headlines as a 20 year-old writer and Reagan disciple who publicly outed members of the Dartmouth Gay Student Alliance in an article for Dartmouth University's Dartmouth Review - D'Souza also honed his writing by attacking Dartmouth's affirmative action policies.

According to the Globe article, "During the 1980s, before and after D'Souza's editorship, the paper was repeatedly in the news for controversies that included taping a Gay Student Alliance meeting, publishing a column in a mocking imitation of black English, ridiculing a class by a black music professor, comparing the university's Jewish president to Adolf Hitler, and falsely asserting that a university chaplain had defended a group advocating sex with adolescents."

I don't know him personally but perhaps D'Souza's ingrained biases are fueled by his conversion to evangelical Christianity? Like Ann Coulter, D'Souza's contempt for non-white, non-Christians is always cloaked in a veneer of intellectualism and so extreme in tone that it suggests that like some immigrants from India, he was quick to adopt the worn cloak of American bigotry and prejudice based on the mental indoctrination of the Indian caste system he was exposed to as a child. Some Indians, certainly not all, come to this country and quickly adopt an open contempt for those they regard as beneath them.

I've explored Indian racism towards African-Americans previously in this blog, but D'Souza genuinely puzzles me. Why was he so quick to adopt such clearly racist views on blacks?

Was he simply eager to demonstrate just how "cultured" he is by adopting negative views of homosexuals and minorities - almost as if to separate himself psychologically from the dark tone of his own skin and his Indian origins.

It's possible he has a need to distinguish himself from those he considers lower on the mental cast system he's formed inside his mind, which is his right to do.

But I'm not sure that excuses bad journalism and sloppy writing - which is exactly what his Forbes cover story is.

Are Indians & Pakistanis Racist Towards African-Americans?

I'd like to make a cultural observation that's frankly left me puzzled. There's rarely much analysis written about it in the mainstream media but there's often a palpable tension or almost imperceptible negative energy directed towards black Americans that seems to emanate from some Pakistanis and Indians who live here in the United States.

Not just in the States either. Back in January, 2008 I blogged about the Indian cricket player Harbhajan Singh (pictured left) who faced charges for repeated racial epithets and obnoxious on-field actions against black opponents during cricket matches.

I've experienced it many times while riding in or trying to hail Yellow Cabs here in New York City (that's a blog site unto itself). I've felt and experienced it in bodegas and delis as well. Most recently I experienced it last Sunday, August 3rd in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey while visiting my mother's house.

She lives in a nice subdivision of interconnected town houses that sits off a two lane semi-rural road about two miles from the crowded Route One corridor in South Brunswick. The local area is comprised of a mixture of dwindling farmland and sprawling neighborhoods of recently- built Toll Brothers homes that look too large to be sitting next to each other on the heavily-taxed 3/4 acre lots they sit on.

Many areas of central New Jersey have seen huge increases in the population of well-educated Asian professionals and families settling into the suburban communities for the school systems and access to both New York and Philadelphia as well as the large corporate presence in and around Princeton.

Many have moved into the sub-division where my mother lives and often times, they stare at us. Now I know the difference between a cursory glance at someone you see in a neighborhood and a lingering stare and it's the latter.

Almost a disassociated observation with little concern for tact. If it sounds a rather un-definitive and abstract notion, it is.

Subtle, not in your face but you can feel it in looks and cars that seem to slow down for the occupants to look at you. My brother was driving me back to my apartment on Sunday afternoon and as we drove towards the exit of the sub-division he hopped out of my mom's 2007 Honda SUV to see if his glasses were in the trunk. A woman in a sari driving a grey four-door Japanese sedan drove by and slowed as she passed.

My brother spends a lot more time out there than I do and he noticed her watching him right off, it annoys him. Bugs me too. My mom has owned the townhouse she's lived in ever since my father died of cancer in 1996 and we sold the house we'd built in West Windsor, New Jersey.

We were both raised in middle-upper class neighborhoods; our parents were both professionals with college degrees - my brother has an undergraduate degree from Rutgers, a degree from the Princeton Theological Seminary and is about to start his dissertation at Columbia. My older sister was Merit Scholar who went to Brown. I graduated from Penn State, played football there and was also an NFL player. We trace our family tree back to a slave brought to the United States in the 1700's - but all the woman who drove by us saw was our skin color.

Bear in mind I harbor no resentment towards Indians and Pakistanis. There's no anti-Hindu or Muslim feeling behind this post. I'm just sharing something I know exists that I never see US media cover - and I am far from the only African-American or person for that matter to notice this.

Check out this 1998 article about Pakistani racism written by Saad Shafqat - a Pakistani. It's entitled, "The Overlooked Problem of Pakistani Racism"

Is it scorn? Is it resentment? Or perhaps the product of cultures that have long-held and deeply ingrained simplistic assumptions about skin color and a mind-set forged from a rigid caste-system mentality that survives in various forms in India to this day.

As my mother has often told me, we all bring baggage to the door when we date someone; it seems there are people bringing cultural baggage with them to the doors of the United States.

Strange that certain members of these cultures direct such feelings towards African-Americans when racism is still directed towards both Indians and Pakistanis in places like England; as in the recent case of Indian actress Shilpa Shetty.

O'Reilly & Spicey's Uncool Week

Sean "Spicey" Spicer and Bill O'Reilly 

Remember back in the fall of 2007 when Fox host Bill O'Reilly went to the famous Harlem restaurant Sylvia's for dinner with Al Sharpton?

He made headlines when he went on his syndicated radio show and marveled at "the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City...There wasn't one person in Sylvia's screaming, 'M-Fer I want more iced tea.'"

Now there were an awful lot of people back then, of different races and ethnicities, who sort of shook their heads in disbelief and realized that O'Reilly had in all likelihood, never eaten in a room with black folks before.

Of course that was simply O'Reilly's way of trying to be magnanimous in a cultural sense (and it was sooooo awkward).

But the fact that he was harboring the impression that black restaurant patrons who want something else to drink just scream out 'M-Fer I want more iced tea!' to their waitress or waiter offered valuable insight into the mindset of the hyper-conservative Fox News audience.

In particular the ways in which they tend to perceive, and portray African American people.

O'Reilly's comment to 78-year-old Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters during a segment on Fox and Friends last week proved that the prickly curmudgeon hasn't really changed a whole lot in ten years.

Or maybe he's simply feeling more free to tap into his "inner Bill" in the era of Trump when the Republican Party has mainstreamed bigotry and intolerance.

If there's any one trait consistently shared by the leading media or political figures of 21st century American conservatism, it's a startling inability (or unwillingness?) to grasp the basic subtleties of race and ethnicity.

Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters

Based on the smirky O'Reilly's snide comment about Waters' hair looking like a "James Brown wig",  it's painfully obvious that the complex issues surrounding black women's hair elude him.

That's not surprising given that he works in a televised ideological vacuum where he doesn't actually have to confront criticism and controls who gets the chance to question him.

After all let's be honest, at this point O'Reilly is basically Rush Limbaugh for TV.

Now in no way am I suggesting that O'Reilly is under some kind of obligation to understand or delve into the elusive complexities of black women's hair, but if he's going to make outlandish and dismissive pronouncements about a female African American Congresswoman's hair on national television, then he damned well better have some idea of what the hell he's talking about.

Maybe a good start for Bill would be to pop open a cold beer, sit down and watch the brilliant 2009 Chris Rock-produced documentary 'Good Hair' - a fascinating look into the $ 9 billion-plus (yes, $9 billion with a B) black hair industry - and, particularly for black women, how hair style is so closely linked with self esteem.

Or, if he prefers reading, Lena Williams' 2000 nonfiction book "It's the Little Things: The Everyday Interactions That Get Under the Skin of Blacks and Whites" offers some really interesting real-life snippets on the issues related to hair that really set black women off.

Check out this excerpt from the book that was published in the New York Times in 1997.

But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for O'Reilly to do either of those things, he seems far more interested (and invested) in tweaking the racial anxieties, assumptions and fears of his Fox News audience.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer on the other hand should know better.

April Ryan (left) during exchange with Spicey

On Tuesday he too made headlines when he somewhat rudely talked over African American reporter April Ryan during a White House press briefing.

With the State Department in a state of chaos, rumors in DC are flying that Trump is considering replacing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with former Bush National Security adviser Condoleeza Rice, Ryan justifiably asked Spicer about Rice's scheduled visit to the White House.


As a Politico.com article detailed on Wednesday, Spicer got testy and defensive and after sort of talking over Ryan, he then told her to stop shaking her head.

The exchange had clear racial undertones in terms of how it looked - a perception magnified by the tone of Trump's campaign and presidency.

Spicer's comments also must be viewed in the context of the glaring silence from the White House and Trump on the various incidents of anti-Semitism and racism that have taken place across the U.S. since the start of the year.

Trump, who tweets ceaselessly about Muslim terrorist acts, was virtually silent about a 51-year-old white man named Adam Purinton shooting and killing an Indian man named Srinivas Kuchibhotla (and wounding another Indian man and a white man who came to their defense too) in a Kansas bar as he yelled "get out of my country".

Victim Timothy Caughman & James Jackson

When reporters in the White House briefing room recently asked Spicer about 66-year-old Timothy Caughman being stabbed and killed with a sword in New York by a racist killer from Baltimore who'd planned to murder black men to stop interracial dating, Spicer ducked the question by saying "I don't know all the details." 

People around the globe knew the details of that incident - why didn't he or Trump?

Let's be clear.

In 21st century America "I don't know all the details" is not a sufficient answer from the White House press secretary when a deranged racist killer stabs a black man on the streets of New York.

Spicer and his boss still don't seem to have grasped the role of the White House in staking out a clear and defined position on the issues that matter most to Americans.

It was Trump's decision to run for one of the most complex jobs on the planet based on his being an "outsider", and then surround himself with a cadre of senior advisers who have more rigid ideological world views and loyalty to Trump than they do experience in politics.

So in my view, the inability of the White House to stake out some kind of position on anti-Semitism, racism and intolerance demonstrates that they really don't yet collectively understand the role and function of the executive branch of the U.S. government outside of the external trappings and "prestige" of the office.

That's just one of the reasons why the decision to pull the Republican healthcare bill last week was such a rude awakening for the Trump administration - he's so consumed with the concept and appearance of power that he doesn't understand how presidential power actually works.

Will Republicans ever have this kind of cool?

Modern American Presidents like FDR, JFK, Reagan and Clinton and most recently Obama did.

They were all shrewd political communicators who understood that presidential power is a limited mandate rooted in the ability to effectively communicate and persuade the voters who grant that mandate once every four years.

The power of the presidency lies in the bully pulpit and the soapbox - the ability to persuade and move the needle to nudge Congress to act.

Not in sitting in the Oval Office signing executive orders in front of cameras and holding them up to be photographed like a fourth grader bringing home a pop quiz with a star on it from school to show his or her parents.

Like it or not Trump is the de facto head of the Republican Party, his poor communication skills combined with a press secretary who simply doesn't discuss issues related to race or ethnicity because he knows it will come back to hurt his boss, is affecting their ability to get their message out.

When you throw in a guy like Bill O'Reilly making bigoted comments about Maxine Waters' hair on Fox News, it paints the Republican Party and conservatives in general as cultural idiots.

Trump campaigns in Macomb County, Michigan

JFK had a "cool factor". So did Reagan, Clinton and Obama.

As we've seen this week, there's just nothing cool about the Republican Party today.

They just come off as angry, spiteful, denigrating, ignorant and overtly intolerant.

Unwelcoming and hostile to the bulk of the American populace.

As I've tried to understand the toxic hatred they've uncorked, which I experienced in my office first-hand three weeks ago, one of the things that's helped me to understand the mindset of the aggrieved working class whites in this country has been Mark Binelli's recent article in Rolling Stone, "Inside Trump County, USA".

His analysis of why the mostly-white, heavily Catholic Michigan county of Macomb voted overwhelmingly for Trump last November despite the region's strong union ties to Michigan's auto and manufacturing industry, has helped me to gain perspective on what's happening in this country.

At the least, it's given me more insight into who Bill O'Reilly was talking to when he insulted Maxine Waters - and why Sean Spicer is afraid to even talk about race.

Native American Actors Exit Set of Adam Sandler's 'The Ridiculous Six' in Protest

Adam Sandler on the set of Netflix's 'The Ridiculous Six'

Netflix has enjoyed huge success as a popular platform for distributing and providing content, and more recently they have altered the broadcast and cable media landscape as a content producer with award-winning original series like 'House of Cards' and 'Orange Is the New Black'.

In doing so they've not only opened the doors for other companies like Amazon to create original content, Netflix has devoted enormous resources to begin developing and producing their own original films as well.

While they have forced more traditional film and television companies and studios to rethink the way they allow consumers to access their content, a recent on-set incident has shown that the challenges of producing your own content are very different from simply paying licensing fees to bring other producer's content to consumers. 

As reported in an article by Vincent Schilling posted on the Website of the Indian Country Today Media Network Website last Thursday, a group of Native American actors as well as an on-set adviser hired to oversee cultural depictions, walked off the set of Adam Sandler's Netflix production, 'The Ridiculous Six' in protest of what they claim are racist and demeaning portrayals of Native Americans and traditional Apache tribal culture in the script of the film currently shooting in Las Vegas, New Mexico.    

White actor Henry Brandon as Scar in 'The Searchers' 1953

The prevalence of negative, limiting or one-dimensional depictions of Native American people in American films has been something of an ugly sore spot on our nation's cultural landscape for years.

With rare exception, up until the 1970's major Native American film characters were played by white actors, such as Henry Brandon (pictured left) who played the infamous blue-eyed murderous kidnapper of white women, Scar in the classic 1953 John Ford film 'The Searchers'.

Despite it's racist depictions of Native Americans, Ford's cinematic masterpiece is still widely considered one of the finest American films of the 20th century, one that offers a complex analysis of the main character, an angry Civil War veteran consumed by racism and hatred played by John Wayne who embarks upon an epic journey to find his white niece; who was kidnapped during a violent attack by Indians who committed unspeakable atrocities upon members of his family before murdering them.

Hollywood bears a lot of responsibility for simplistic portrayals of Native Americans as "blood-thirsty savages", drunken buffoons, docile superstitious imbeciles, or war-like barbarians.

Will Sampson as Chief in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'

But that began to change in the 1970's with the appearance of more complex and nuanced Native American characters colored with humanity in films like 'Little Big Man',  'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' (pictured left) and 'The Outlaw Josey Wales'.

More recently films like 'Dances With Wolves' and 'The Last of the Mohicans' offered new insight into the complexity of Native American culture in successful and critically-acclaimed films that managed to blend history, action/adventure and romance with compelling screenplays that forced film audiences to look at American history from a new perspective.

That's part of what makes the incident with Adam Sandler's film so puzzling.

Given all the publicity surrounding the ongoing controversy over the mascot name and logo of the Washington Redskins, you'd think the producers of a big-budget western comedy that contains Native American characters would be mindful of that (as well as Hollywood's history) in terms of how those characters are portrayed.

Even if 'The Ridiculous Six' (a spoof of 'The Magnificent Seven') is an Adam Sandler comedy (he co-wrote the script), is it really necessary to have a female Native American character named 'Beaver Breath'? Or have an Apache woman character smoking a peace pipe while squatting to pee?  

Can't Native American characters in comedy films be presented in respectful ways that don't sink to the lowest common denominator?

In light of a more organized and coordinated Native American media response to the Washington Redskins' controversy, the actors and cultural adviser who walked off the set last Wednesday have generated a good deal of online media attention since the story broke last Thursday.

'The Ridiculous Six' is a huge financial investment and a big risk for both Netflix and Adam Sandler.

With a cast that also includes Nick Nolte, Steve Buscemi, Dan Akroyd, Jon Lovits and former "rapper" Vanilla Ice, the walk-out by Native American actors during production is not just going to blow away.

Tribal leaders have already spoken out publicly about the film and the story is getting bigger coverage on the Web.

If the film's producers were smart, they'd immediately address the concerns expressed by Native American actors involved with the film, make some changes to the script, release a public statement with an apology, invite the actors who walked off the set back to the production and get on with filming before the controversy starts to overshadow the film itself.

Otherwise they could be facing the same kind of disastrous media flap that happened to Sony's comedy about the assassination of the North Korean leader 'The Interview' last December.

The Native American perspective on 'The Ridiculous Six' is perhaps best summed up by actor David Hill, a 74 year-old Choctaw and member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) who was one of those who walked off the set last week.

He was quoted in Vincent Schilling's ICTMN.com article as saying of the producers; "They were being disrespectful. They were bringing up those same old arguments Dan Snyder uses in defending the (Washington) Redskins. But let me tell you, our dignity is not for sale....I hope they will listen to us. We understand this is a comedy, we understand this is humor, but we won't tolerate disrespect."
   

Dinesh D'Souza Gets "Ghetto" On President Obama

Conservative commentator Dinesh DSouza

Author Dinesh D'Souza is once again making media headlines for yet another in a long string of dimwitted, racially-tinged comments about President Obama.

As Olivia Kittel of Media Matters reported earlier today, in response to Obama being interviewed on BuzzFeed recently to promote the upcoming deadline to sign up for health care, D'Souza took to Twitter to post a photo of the media savvy President taking a selfie with the following comment: 
"YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE GHETTO...Watch this vulgar man show his stuff, while America cowers in embarrassment." (Those are his CAPS not mine by the way)

So what does any of that have to do with the Affordable Care Act? Not much, but D'Souza has never been one to let little things like logic, sense, readability or truth get in the way of his fiery conservative prose.

His latest 93-word Tweet is vintage D'Souza (see example below) and pretty much manages to sum up the kind of intellectually void claptrap he writes that makes him such a revered intellectual demi-god among conservative Republicans.

The conservative Indian-American author, commentator and Fox News darling has been peddling his delusional mix of unhinged political opinion, bigotry and right-wing propaganda since his days at Dartmouth College, where he took pleasure using his position as an editor for the monthly student publication The Prospect and as a writer on the Dartmouth Review as a platform for his homophobia, racism and intolerance for virtually anything that falls outside of the spectrum of Anglo-Christian, politically conservative and heterosexual.

D'Souzas's entrenched cultural elitism likely stems from his relatively privileged upbringing in Mumbai, India where he was born to parents who were Catholics; his father was an executive for Johnson & Johnson and his mother was a housewife.

His K-12 education in Mumbai's elite Catholic schools (and his father's influence) served as a springboard for him to study abroad in America; in of all places - Arizona, the land of Barry Goldwater and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio; same guy who harasses immigrants on the taxpayer dime, sued the president and sentences inmates to restricted diets of bread and water for relatively minor infractions.  

So if you consider where he comes from and how he was educated, his Ann Coulter-ish brand of predictable conservatism based on demeaning others actually makes sense.

Sad and pathetic yes, but it makes sense.

D'Souza's November 26, 2013 Tweet

D'Souza seemed to discover his purpose in the wake of the election of President Obama in 2008 as the Republican Party morphed into a breeding ground for right-wing conservative extremism.

The anger-filled Tea Party movement bankrolled by Charles and David Koch became an all-inclusive cesspool of bigoted, misogynist, obstructionist, fear-pandering reactionary philosophy - and D'Souza leaped right in.

He's been there ever since, gleefully yanking the chains of right-wing Obama haters by creating content that demeans the President because of his race; like the Thanksgiving Tweet D'Souza released on November 26, 2013 as millions around the globe struggled to make sense of the death of an innocent black teenager.

Just like the offensive Tweet above, his latest Tweet using words like "ghetto" and "vulgar" to describe the leader of the free world is basically the intellectual equivalent of "Obama has cooties", but again, that's who Dinesh D'souza really is when you get beyond the critically-panned books and paid speaking appearances at conservative think-tanks.

Frankly, a moralizing hypocritical wannabe-Christian theologian who cheated on his wife and is a convicted felon has a lot of gall calling anyone "ghetto" - let alone the President.

      

The Problem We All Live With

The Tea Party helped mainstream racist views

It's become uncomfortably clear in this country that the divisive tone of the 2016 Republican presidential campaign seems to have had the effect of granting people a tacit permission to publicly and openly express bigotry, racism and intolerance in ways that seem dredged up from darker corners of America's troubled past.

Ever since the results of the November 8th election last fall it's been difficult to keep up with all the different ways in which hatred bigotry and divisiveness have manifested in the actions and words of some Americans.

In the months since the start of the chaotic presidential transition, we've witnessed a disturbing rise in hate incidents, from young Muslim women being harassed in public for wearing the Hijab, to grave stones in Jewish cemeteries being overturned and desecrated.

There've been deadly consequences as well, like last month when a 51-year-old Kansas man named Adam Purinton was charged with murder after opening fire on two Indian engineers in a crowded bar after yelling at them to "Get out of my country."

Four days after Donald Trump was elected president, as multiple reports of schools across America being defaced with sickening racist and anti-Semitic graffiti, I blogged about having discovered that some individual, or individuals had defaced the elementary school I attended in Bethesda, Maryland with swastikas.

Up to that point, that's about as personal as it got for me, but that changed last Wednesday.

A horse-drawn wagon with a coffin bearing the
N-Word leads a funeral procession in 2007 

An incident that took place in my office at work reminded me that even though it's been ten years since the NAACP symbolically buried the N-Word during a ceremonial funeral that took place during their annual convention in Detroit in 2007, the word is alive and well in this country.

I can't speak for all African-Americans or people of color, but I can recall with perfect clarity the times during my life that a white person has called me a nigger to my face.



Few words in the English language possess the kind of power that one does, and it's my personal choice not to use it in general - it's a degrading and detestable racial slur with toxic historical connotations.

As Randall Kennedy observed in "All About That Troublesome Word", an informative essay on the historical context of the N-Word published in the September / October 2016 issue of American History magazine, "Sociologist Elijah Anderson has written, 'There comes a time in the life of every African-American when he or she is powerfully reminded of his or her's putative place as a black person.' Anderson refers to it as the 'nigger moment.' "

One of the more unpleasant aspects of being an apartment leasing agent is that you have to process tenant complaints, and rest assured, there were a huge volume of those during the snowstorm that hit last week.

As some of you know the problem with the snow that hit New Jersey last week was that it was so cold that the temperature never got above freezing the day after it snowed.

Cars piled with frozen snow in NJ last week

And the night after that, any snow that hadn't been removed from cars on Tuesday basically just froze solid.

The parking lots, walkways and streets were cleared, but a lot of older tenants waited until the snow was basically like ice to try and dig their cars out.

Those who didn't go out and clear the snow off on Tuesday, their cars looked like those in the photo to the left.

And on Tuesday night, all that snow froze solid, it wasn't powder, it was like a block of ice.

So this older white tenant in his 60's comes into the leasing office on Wednesday and starts complaining about the frozen snow between he and his wife's cars; unless people move the cars out of the parking spaces, crews can't use the plows to clear them out - there's no room to use equipment between parked vehicles.

We'd been getting calls all day by the time this guy came in, and even though he'd been out in his truck and was able to get around, he was complaining about the snow around the sides of his wife's car not being cleared - but it was still frozen so the crews couldn't do anything about it, they were all busy clearing other walkways and sections of the lots anyway.

After several attempts to explain that nicely to him, he kept getting angrier at me and at that point the phone was ringing and there wasn't anything else that could be done until the snow started to thaw; the only thing I could do was give him the number to the main office so he could register a complaint.

That made him angrier, so he walks to the door points his finger at me and threatens to call the local Township and I told him he was welcome to do that - so he storms out and said, "Fuckin' nigger!"

Now I was pissed, I know the guy, he's a Trump voter and he's embittered about the state of everything and here he is during one of the worst snow storms of the year calling me a derogatory racial slur because there's ice piled around his wife's car.

Center for Media Justice Founder Malkia Cyril

Controversy related to the open use of the N-Word is also reflected in the realm of social media as well.

Last year Ruth Reader wrote an interesting article posted on Mic.com examining the efforts Facebook is making to try and confront some of the same issues related to race.

Malkia Cyril, founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice and a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement, met with Facebook company leaders over issues related to opponents of the BLM movement and trolls using the N-Word and other inflammatory and threatening language in the commentary sections of the various public BLM Facebook pages that she manages.

As Cyril pointed out in Reader's Mic.com article, when women of color post photos of their breasts on Facebook BLM pages as a way to bring attention to the deaths of black women; Facebook quickly pulls the photos down.

But, as Cyril told Mic.com: "And yet, being called a nigger, which is equally an explicit violation of Facebook's policies, not only can take weeks to get addressed, but also frequently we're told, 'It doesn't violate our code of conduct."

While Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has written publicly in support of Black Lives Matter and initiated internal efforts to improve Facebook's efforts to remove racial slurs that violate it's policies, Cyril's accounts of the huge volume of incendiary race-based comments that flood the commentary sections of BLM's public Facebook pages reflects a deeper problem with race in America.

One that's grown worse with the rise in divisive right-wing media, the formation of the Tea Party during President Obama's first term and the eventual election of Donald Trump.

The home where I grew up on the right, and the
street where I was first called the N-Word 

My first nigger moment came when I was eight-years-old, I was outside my family's home on the quiet tree-lined suburban street in Bethesda, Maryland where I grew up (pictured left).

I was the only black boy in a group of about five boys playing on a warm summer afternoon when a relatively minor dispute over something silly turned into a shoving match between me and a white boy a year older than me named Greg.

He was older than me but I was a little bigger than him, and in an effort to get him off me I sort of pushed him into a bush and he tore his t-shirt.

Out of the blue he narrowed his eyes and sneered at me, "Nigger!"

Like it was an accusation or a pronunciation of some sort that was meant to end the dispute.

I recall the energy in the air as we stared at each other breathing heavily from our boyish shoving, and I remember becoming simultaneously conscious of my skin color, and aware that he viewed me as being different from the other boys - even though we'd all played together before.

Last week I had the same sense of confusion, anger and hurt when the same old guy whose application I'd helped get approved two years ago called me the N-Word to my face.

Would he have called me that two years ago? I don't think so. Is this what Trump and The Stephen's meant by Making America Great Again?

For me personally, some of the thoughts expressed on the pages of this blog over the years are, in some ways, spiritual.

But it's not about my religion, which to me is a very personal thing.

To me there are many paths to God, and different faiths and beliefs choose different ways to get to the same place.

Norman Rockwell's "The Problem We All Live With"

Each morning I take a few minutes to read the Daily Word, its daily message offers a chance to meditate spiritually and center one's thoughts before the busyness of the day unfolds - I find it's often timely to the circumstances in my life.

This morning as I lay in bed thinking about how to use writing to process what happened in my office last week, a particular line in this morning's message titled "Awaken" struck me as particularly helpful in trying view last week's issue.

"I understand that the diversity in people and in all creation is a gift from God."

To me that sums up what most people on this planet think about diversity.

Whether it's diversity in people, plants, animals, planets or stars - the rich diversity that distinguishes life in this universe in all it's forms is a gift.

Simply being able to stop and recognize that is a gift.

So those who would use toxic and hateful words to demean other people simply because of their religion, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference are those who condemn, hate and fear diversity.

They are trapped in a place of profound negativity where emptiness, anger, resentment and darkness have clouded their perception of the world around them - so they are unable to see the gift of diversity.

They are unable to understand it.

In that state of ignorance, blinded by a form of self-hatred that is, in essence, anti-life, they are to be pitied.

Perhaps the incident I experienced in my office last Wednesday is, as the title of American painter Norman Rockwell's iconic 1964 oil painting (pictured above) of six-year-old African-American student Ruby Bridges being escorted to the all-white William Frantz Elementary School by four white U.S. Marshals at the height of the tension of the of the New Orleans school desegregation crisis suggests, is simply "The Problem We All Live With".  

Taibbi Tackles the Inequities of America's Two-Tiered Society - Heidi Klum in 'Red-Face'?

Journalist-author Matt Taibbi

As the most unproductive and heartless US Congress in American history gears up to block a Senate bill to restore unemployment benefits to over 3 million members of the long-term unemployed, it's not hard to feel discouraged by the steady un-Democratization of this nation.

This week a private research study shows that in 2013, US corporations held a staggering $2.1 trillion in profits overseas to avoid paying taxes at a time when they're making record profits at home, flailing about the evils of raising the minimum wage and being coy about starting to rehire Americans on a large scale. 

On top of that we discover the cash reserves of the nations largest banks are underfunded by billions of dollars a mere six years after the financial meltdown of 2008 - and we all know who was on the hook for that one - and who was let off the hook.

Lately the conservative members of the Roberts Supreme Court are making it seem less a politically autonomous branch of the Federal government dedicated to interpreting the Constitution, than a disassociated bunch of cranky old farts perpetually stuck in the intellectually-nonsensical ideological bubble of the Fox News world.  

Case in point (bad pun intended): the high court's recent decision to further undermine the Democratic process in this nation by making it more difficult to define political corruption, while simultaneously making it easier for wealthy political donors to pour enormous sums of money into the election process.

And remember, that's after they struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, essentially making it easier for state legislatures to make it harder for citizens to vote.

But just when things look bleak, Matt Taibbi cuts through the fog with his signature blend of relentless hard-hitting journalism. On Monday I heard an interesting interview with Taibbi on NPR as he discussed his latest book, "The Great Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap".

Click the link above and give it a listen if you've got a few minutes. In the past couple years his essays in Rolling Stone have taken on the issues that the mainstream media has totally shied away from; topics like the deep-seated corruption within the US and global financial system, the complexities of the LIBOR scandal, the rigging of commodities markets, the mortgage crisis and the implosion of the housing market and of course, the massive inequities in the US justice system.

Taibbi said after spending years on topics related to the financial meltdown, he was personally struck over how difficult it seemed to be to bring any individual from the corporate or banking sector to trial or jail time; yet it was and is frighteningly easy to jail someone for welfare fraud, possessing small amounts of illegal drugs - or simply for no reason at all beyond an over-zealous police force, lack of access to legal counsel, overwhelmed public defenders' offices and prosecutors seemingly determined to keep US prisons filled with non-violent offenders.

To borrow a quote from the new book cited in the NPR article about Taibbi:
"Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world's wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail."

Don't hold your breath waiting for CNN, NBC, ABC, FOX or CBS to broach that topic on prime-time news. Outside of Frontline and Bill Moyers on PBS and Vice on HBO, mainstream media doesn't see the biggest story in this nation as much of a story at all. That's just sad; and unfortunately not unintentional. Bread and Circuses...

Anyway, to some lighter fare. Now let me just say first that I have no axe to grind with super model turned fashion show host and arbiter of good taste Heidi Klum. I've a seen a few episodes of Project Runway, and she's pretty sharp and has a good sense of humor in a no-nonsense German kind-of-way.

So what the hell was she thinking promoting a Germany's Next Top Model photo shoot featuring hot young German frauleins posing in 'Red-Face' in Native American costumes and scenarios?

As ThinkProgress.com reports Klum is receiving flack on her Facebook page, social media platforms and from a host of Websites and blogs for lending her name, face and reputation to this ill-advised promotional campaign that incorporates Native American stereotypes and imagery.

Given Germany's ongoing struggle to move beyond the dark legacy of the Third Reich and its institutionalized racism before and during World War II that led to millions of deaths, how could Klum not know what a disaster a group of young German girls dressing up as provocative little Indian-sex kittens would be? Och! Heidi!

It really hasn't been a good PR month for Germany.

The April issue of Vanity Fair Magazine features Alex Shoumatoff's brilliant expose article on the recent trove of over 1,280 artworks originally stolen and confiscated from Jewish families, art dealers and collectors (fleeing Germany or sent to the camps from Germany and France) in WWII that ended up in the Munich apartment of a strange German recluse named Cornelius Gurlitt.

Seriously, you really have to read this Vanity Fair article to gain some insight on this monumental art theft. Gurlitt's father was an art dealer for the Nazis and helped to broker the sales of thousands of pieces of art Hitler labeled "degenerate". Gurlitt's apartment was packed with an estimated billion dollars worth of priceless art by a range of master painters including Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin, Dix and more.

One of the most interesting tidbits from the article: cosmetic billionaire Ronald Lauder, who's supported efforts to return looted art to the original Jewish owners for years, claims the German government has housed tens of thousands of pieces of looted art in the basements and vaults of it's museums since the end of the War; knowing full well where they came from. 

It's a rather disturbing read, but an enlightening one as well that lends insight into a crime against humanity which in many ways, is still going on to this day.

Colectivos, MS-13 & Trump's War On Fact

Members of the Tupamaro colectivo in Venezuela 

An article in yesterdays New York Times written by Patricia Torres and Nicholas Casey offered chilling insight into groups of armed civilians in Venezuela who roam the troubled country acting as enforcers on behalf of embattled president Nicholas Maduro.

The article quotes a researcher named Dr. Oscar Noya who studies infectious tropical diseases, he noted that his laboratory has been vandalized more than 30 times.

The perpetrators are armed paramilitaries, leftist pro-government groups originally started by the former socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez known as "colectivos" (or collectives).

So why would colectivos trash the laboratory of a man researching tropical diseases?

Because he publishes information about epidemics of dangerous tropical diseases like malaria that President Maduro's government does not want made public.

Which is interesting considering that (according to Wikipedia) colectivos claim to be "dedicated to the promotion of democracy, political groups and cultural activities."

As the New York Times article notes, colectivos have also gunned down some of the hundreds of thousands of civilians who've recently taken to the streets of Venezuelan cities to protest the lack of food and medicine and demand new elections.

Colectivos on motorcycles shot 17 year-old protester Carlos Moreno in the head last Wednesday.

In 2016 a group of colectivos shot hospital union leader Eladio Mata in the back when negotiations with officials from University Hospital in Caracas ground to a halt.

One of more than 600 Marches for Science on Earth Day

These actions are reflective of a disturbing trend around the globe; government authorities who try to suppress information, journalistic freedom and political opposition.

As the first hundred days of the Trump administration have have demonstrated, it's a growing problem here in America as well.

Tens of thousands of people around the globe marched against the suppression of facts yesterday.

One of the good things about tens of thousands of people showing up to march in major cities and small towns around the world in support of scientific facts is that partisan Republican politicians can't simply dismiss it as some kind of "publicity stunt" cooked up by liberal interests who paid supporters to spend their Saturday marching in the streets.

Yesterday the thousands of protesters (including my sister and mother in Princeton!) who marched in support of science demonstrated that people are fed up with political organizations like the Republican Party that elevate rigid ideology and loyalty to corporate interests over facts and research.

Knowledge that's squarely in the best interest of humans, animals, plants and the environment in which we all live.

There's no question that the March For Science was a message aimed straight at the Trump administration and the scores of Republican lawmakers on the local, state and national level who pretend that human activity and the extraction and burning of fossils isn't damaging the atmosphere, land and water.

Adviser Kellyane Conway may have been relegated to the proverbial basement of the White House (notice her absence from the media for weeks?), but Trump and his administration continue to peddle "alternative facts" as truth.

Idiocracy? Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump

Last Tuesday the White House desperately tried to deflect focus from the embarrassing revelation that the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Carl Vinson was actually over 3,500 miles away from the coast of Korea operating in the Indian Ocean for joint naval exercises with the Australian Navy at the same time that Donald Trump was on Fox News boasting about "sending an armada" to North Korea.

AG Jeff Sessions tried to help his flailing boss out by using an all-too-common Trump administration tactic:


Blaming stuff on Obama and whipping up fears about immigrants.

It was insightful listening to Trump and the alarming right-wing extremist perjurer from Alabama he nominated as the nation's attorney general try to blame the Obama administration's immigration policies for the nationwide expansion of the violent street gang MS-13.

Clearly MS-13 is responsible for some pretty nasty stuff both here in the U.S., in places stretching from Long Island to Los Angeles, and in Central American nations like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras; including violent murders, rape and assault.

But unlike the factually-shaky claims made by Sessions in front of the Organized Crime Council last Tuesday, MS-13's expansion both here and abroad was a direct result of marginalized, traumatized and disenfranchised refugees fleeing the horrific violence of the civil war that raged in El Salvador for over twelve years between 1979 and 1993.

More disturbing than Sessions' and Trump's simplistic attempts to cast blame for the recent brutal slayings of four Hispanic teenage boys by MS-13 in Central Islip, Long Island on the Obama administration, are their efforts to try and harness the justifiable outrage over the killings to try and sway national opinion about Trump's draconian immigration policies and desire to construct his wall.

Heavily tattooed members of MS-13

If Trump and Sessions really cared about the violence unleashed by MS-13, they'd do something about the massive socioeconomic inequality that divided the people of El Salvador that lies at the root of the civil war and the eventual rise of MS-13.

A war fueled in no small part by the Carter, Reagan and Bush administration's support of El Salvador's government as it systematically tortured and murdered tens of thousands of innocent people.

MS-13 is the birth-child of the twelve-year reign of terror known as the Salvadoran Civil War.

Some of the more than 550,000 people who fled El Salvador in the 1980's to escape the killing eventually found their way to Los Angeles, where like many new immigrant groups arriving in new countries, they sometimes found themselves the targets of harassment and intimidation.

Young El Salvadorans in particular began to band together to protect themselves from the dense network of mostly Hispanic, Mexican and African-American street gangs in East Los Angeles and South Central LA - some of whom had existed since the 1940's.

Refugees from El Salvador who arrived in LA in the 1980's found themselves at the height of the city's gang epidemic when as many as 200,000 gang members in hundreds of different gangs fought for territory and control over the lucrative drug trade - particularly crack cocaine.

In contrast to Trump and Session's baseless assertion last week that the Obama administration's immigration policy is to blame for MS-13's rise in the U.S., ironically it was the deportation of members of MS-13 (or Mara Salvatrucha) by U.S. customs agents in the 1980's and 1990's that led to the expansion of MS-13.

Two MS-13 members charged with murdering a
15-year-old girl in Houston in March, 2017 

As experienced MS-13 gang members returned to El Salvador, they began recruiting heavily from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

As the gang has expanded their power and influence, they've migrated to San Francisco, Newark and Plainfield, New Jersey, parts of Queens, New York, Houston, Texas, Charlotte, North Carolina and into the suburbs outside Washington, D.C. including Prince George's County, Virginia and parts of Montgomery County, Maryland including Takoma Park.



Despite Trump's empty hot-air rhetoric last week, a wall isn't going to keep MS-13 out of America, the reality is that they are already here and have been for years.

While MS-13 represents a danger to communities both here in the U.S. and abroad, Trump and Sessions are wrong to blame President Obama's immigration policy for it; organized crime experts like InSight co-director Steven Dudley and investigator Hector Silva Avalos have already categorically dismissed such claims as false and without merit.

MS-13 is a violent organization with a history of engaging in terror and bloodshed, but they are not the result of the Obama administration's immigration policy - they are a byproduct of a violent and bloody civil war conducted with the cooperation and assistance of the United States government.

The attempts by Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions to exploit fears of MS-13's violence to goad Congress into authorizing the spending of billions of dollars on a wall and morph America's immigration policy into a reflection of the Trump administration's racism, xenophobia and bigotry is reprehensible, opportunistic and petty - hallmarks of his first 100 days in office.

Archbishop Oscar Romero

According to various estimates, over 70,000 civilians were killed in El Salvador between 1979 and 1993 during the civil war; trauma that in turn spawned MS-13.

Heinous acts like the Sumpul River Massacre carried out by forces of the government of El Salvador on May 14, 1980 in which over 600 civilians including children, elderly and pregnant women were killed, triggered international outrage and helped draw attention to the conflict.

But few deaths were more high profile than the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

He was shot on March 24, 1980 while celebrating Mass in a hospital just a day after he had publicly implored members of El Salvador's military and police forces not to obey orders to kill innocent civilians.


Just a month before his death he published an open letter to President Jimmy Carter asking him to stop supporting the government of El Salvador.

A passionate Jesuit advocate for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised, Archbishop Romero once observed,

"There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried." 

Obtuse self-serving narcissists like Donald Trump look at the violence committed by MS-13 and see only the opportunity to use it to justify bigotry, xenophobia and his own shallow political objectives.

He is unable and unwilling to look at the deeper socioeconomic factors including massive inequities in wealth and marginalization of the poor that spawned the U.S.-supported Salvadoran Civil War from which MS-13 was born.

Like too many Republican politicians in America today, Trump and Sessions close their eyes to the truths that do not serve their own personal agendas.

They willingly blind themselves to see only what they want to see.