White house. Black house.

If caution is a characteristic of conservatism, then I must own up to that side of my personality. I sometimes yield to chicken-shit tentativity when expressing observations on the racially polarised landscape we find ourselves living in. But not today.

As one who is given to frequent rumination on such issues, from a perspective of cultural complexity, I'm understandably drawn to, and opinionated on, this discourse - despite assuming a position high above the fray as a proud proselyte of an (admittedly) idealistic tabula rasa (Rasta?). The One Love philosophy.






Racism is the polar opposite of this stance, being based in bias; i.e. the principle of any race's intrinsic preferability over another. Bio-specific minutiae, such as variability in skin-tone and sundry genetic distinctions, are the props it's built on, but racism's broad purview includes cultural corollary to this precept.

Acknowledging that there's a case to be made for racism being a natural characteristic of the human species, there can nevertheless be no doubting that colonial expansion over the last five centuries, for all the wonderful countries founded, also compounded the issue and extended hegemonies, via empire.

In the United States, and other post-colonial societies with historically race-based beginnings, race is a DNA factor that colors culture and political affiliations. Variants apply but this view is through black 'n' white specs.

Sensitivities surround the word racist, even when used as mere explanation. It tends to trigger soul-denial, and render generalization and selective memory powerful psychological tools in the struggle for representative power.

This has fostered a proliferation of codified, and not so codified pejoratives. The establishment of an African-American POTUS has laid bare nerves beneath a filmy epidermis of equanimity, as this remarkable democracy seeks to retain its ascendancy.















"Communist," "dictator," "terrorist," "thief," are nouns from only one comment-thread, in one disaffected right-wing article parsing the 2012 re-election result, but I've seen several such. The same thread is decorated with adjectives like "evil" and "ruthless," with more than one bright spark styling Barack Obama as "Anti-Christ" ("read your bible") and "Son of Lucifer" ("666 - The Beast").

I'll deliberately avoid rehashing cretinous diatribes on magic negroes, bones in the nose, monkeys, makers/takers and nooses. 

So help me Jah, I couldn't make this stuff up. Wry smile. More.

One of the things I grapple with in this climate, is the reluctance of so many white American voters to draw the connection between a Republican vote and a racial slap-in-the-face. In light of palpable idiocy and ill-concealed hatred from right-wing ranks, I'm ecstatic at G.O.P. misery at the polls. Even if Mitt Romney was a financial magician, it would've been regrettable to empower the social luddites and those who refuse to take them to task.

For sure, there is no economic prosperity worth sacrificing social propriety for, and none achievable without it.

The sting in the tail here is, if anyone points out how suspicious this vitriol is, toward Obama's frequently referenced heritage, the charge of racism gets defensively leveled at them.

















Let's get one thing straight. Racists tend to use the unqualified term "reverse racism" with impunity. It deflects the onus of understanding by identifying pushback as the primary impetus. This only serves to perpetuate ignorance and impasse.

"Liberal" and "conservative" are not bad words, nor mutually exclusive from racism, but it does seem difficult for the latter to transcend or decry bigotry. So much so that Obama optimists get accused of being divisive and disingenuous when it's patently clear who really is. Witness voter allegiance.

It's sad, demoralizing, polarizing, undignifying, yet still, somehow fascinating and instructive just how much adrenaline an American election can inject into this dialectic. Nearly all of old Confederacy voted Republican, and a vast majority of non-whites ("minority" is a misnomer now) voted Democrat.

Americans, of the United States, deserve less entrenchment.
 

... Attack The Block, aliens and allegory ...

... ok fam, so it's jus' a movie right, 'cept it's more' than tha', innit ... it's bere laffs for one fing, and it chucks right off th' screen at u, an' pawns u by the bollocks ... not just y' biggie smalls bruv, but them bollocks in y' brain as well ... f'real gangsta! ... an' you done know seh it's not jus' di man dem pon the ends got bollocks, the girls dem too, yeh ... trus' me! ...

... Red, Gold and Grey, the colorz of a new Rainbow Country ... don't fear if you're allergic to spoilers, the call whether to continue reading is entirely up to you, but I'm more likely to be looking at a bigger picture than specific plot-points in this fun indie flick ... Attack The Block is set in the same Britain that recently ruptured close to social seams that have been straining for some time ... when they call it "Blighty" you can picture the traditional imagery, 'cept now a swathe of pop-youth-culture is inflected with reggae-isms and hip-hop ... 

... aliens and allegory, right and wrong, cops and robbers, boys and girls, weed and wisdom, not to mention guns and guts ... this movie finds a balance between modest (in focus and means) and boasty (in characters and thematic riches) ...

... trash an' ready for the Leicester Square red carpet, the young cast of this entertaining little feature presents a reflection of an emerging generation of tenancy in UK inner-cities ... young, gifted and bored ... poly-racial little-big-men slinging yard slangs and attitudinal overtones of cockney-cool and bluster ...

... the allegorical story survives precocious characters, even daring to feature a leader named Moses, humanizing the very people historian David Starkey pointed to before invoking lurking memories of Enoch Powell's 1968 "rivers of blood" speech ... his statements read like cliche formula, race equals riots, but the big picture is more instructive, beginning with the historical veracity of expansion into lands considered claimable ... occupants therein deemed inferior and taught, indeed bred, behaviors of subservience, in deference to a lust for sweet lucre ...

... zzzzzp (the sound of scrolling through intervening years) ... to a world where Bolt and Becks are boss, Mavado matters more than Mountbatten and Yellowman is still known in some dances as King ... a one-time vortex of empire we know as Jamaica continues to resonate that very energy, only now it plays out in the wider world precisely because of the complicated psychologies associated with shedding shackles of any kind ... the pushback of life's pendulum is the riddim of Creation ...

... it doesn't escape my notice that Starkey and Bob Marley were born early in the same year ... I compare how relevant their respective legacies are to the youth on the block, who, like punks generations ago, get called-out publicly by people who just don't get it ... is like dey dealin' wit' aliens, blood ...

... and still, natural as change is, there's always friction at the intersection of past and present, with lessons to be learned and adjustments to be made by all concerned, assuring social advancement, even as variables continue to require adaptation ...

... writer/director Joe Cornish sends for extra-terrestrials in Attack The Block as foils for our heroes, effective dramatic counterweight, the blackest of avenging intruders ... ironically, their deep darkness actually illuminates common-ground above the socially stratified post-colonial Queendom ...

... British expediency, Tudor through Victorian, before and after, has woven itself into social DNA far beyond the ports of Bristol or Liverpool, and back ... that the hybrid language of the street should bristle is understandable, but the true "tell" is in the tone of the reaction it elicits ... Mr. Starkey's freestyle, on-air apoplexy over "Jamaican patois" was fed by troubling imagery of wanton looting, but the selective tack and torque of his commentary betrays fear and revulsion, two cornerstones of racist reaction, so often negative in intent and impact ...

... the economical, character-driven storytelling of Attack The Block ecourages viewers to calibrate private sensitivity to larger issues via developments that find truth in the personalities of the protagonists and their personal choices ... but, lest you get the impression it's a dry celluloid lecture, and use that as reason to delay, I assure you, this rollick's a real riot ...

... oops, I mean ...  it's a lark innit, bashment yeh?! ... the movie's boom! ... believe! ...

... brown babies and beasts of burden ...

... whenever I'm flipping through channels and I happen upon the face of Wanda Sykes I'm compelled to stop ... to watch and listen ... such is the effect of her elfin visage on me ... it's the same sort of compulsion when I see the goofy mischief in Tracy Morgan's face ... I expect the laughter to come instinctively and I'd put money on it being slightly uncomfortable at times too ...















... I happened upon Wanda's stand-up this week, her topical material these days is heavy on Obama ... understandably ... and still includes the shtick she used at the White House Correspondents dinner event she was invited to regale ... clearly, like many, she's proud of America for electing a black Prez ... adding, "that's unless he fucks up, then it's like, who voted for the half-white guy? .... who voted for the mulatto?" ...

... hold up ... reeeewind .... mulatto?! ...

... now, as we all know ... context is everything in controversial matters, especially in comedy, and despite my knee-jerk cringe I don't have a problemo with the use of a word in service of an act of contemporary performance ... for me this includes the notorious "n" word ... "nigger/nigga"... after all, they are just words ... words which can be rendered odious by rank overuse, ignorant abuse or malicious intent ... no ... the spark that has set off my powderkeg is to be found in the aftermath ... the whole idea of mixed-race sub-labelling ...

... even taking into consideration cultural variances ... I'm told the antecedents of the term carry no negative holdover in Spanish and Portuguese speaking cultures and mulatto/mulatta is seen as an affirmation of aesthetic positives ... well, just how do you separate a cafe-au-lait range of skintones and ringlets from the commercial trading of Africans? ... and what were the purposes for the arithmetic of African-ness on a scale of mulatto(half-African) to hexadecaroon(one-sixteenth African)? ... to quote Wikipedia ... "Defining an individual mathematically is inherently reductive, and these terms derived from the slave trade which treated these people as chattel." ... yet still, some people refer to themselves as mulatto ... I've heard defense of the fifteenth-century coinage with simple justification ...

..."it's in the dictionary"...

... it's safe to say Wiki is the new Webster's ... I hope to trigger a spike in hits on the definition of mulatto ... there you find a wider treatment than a dictionary would offer ... you're given enough insight to decide whether the term is a descriptive or a loaded label ... meanwhile children are born, and those who would comment can scamper to clarify the appropriateness of their terminology ... if I'm a mulatto for instance, are my children also? ... there are undoubtably even narrower slots into which Wanda's own recently arrived twins could be put ...

... interestingly, as I write this there's a case in Louisiana, U.S.A. of a marriage license being denied to an interracial couple ... the backlash of outrage, though quick, loud and widespread only goes so far to counter the intuition that such attitudes are symptomatic of deeply ingrained social biases based on historically engineered hierarchies ...

... confronting these aspects of our multi-cultural realities can feel Quixotic at times and most would rather not bother or have to in these modern times ... me included ... but alas ... a luta continua ...

... my approach has settled into a mature place ... just the facts ma'am ... the term mulatto derives from the Spanish/Portuguese word for mule ... we know that a mule is only produced from a horse and a donkey ... so ... as cute as these noble-yet-lowly beasts-of-burden can be when they are babies, they are a result of inter-species mating and are therefore generally sterile ... I don't know about you but none of the mulattoes I know fit this description ...

... Methuselah was a white man? ...

... The marriage of an 80 year old man and a 20 year old woman was the talk of the town. After being married a year, the couple went to the hospital for the birth of their first child.The attending nurse came out of the delivery room to congratulate the old gentleman and said, "This is amazing. How do you do it at your age?" The old man grinned and said, "you got to keep the old motor running"...

... The following year, the couple returned to the hospital for the birth of their second child. The same nurse was attending the delivery and again went out to congratulate the old gentleman. She said, "Sir, you are something else. How do you manage it?" Grinning, the old man said, "You gotta keep the old motor running"...

... A year later, the couple returned to the hospital for the birth of their third child. The same nurse was there for this birth also and, after the delivery, she once again approached the old gentleman, smiled, and said, "Well, you surely are something else! How do you do it?" The old man replied, "It's like I've told you before, you gotta keep the old motor running" ...

... The nurse, still smiling, patted him on the back and said "Well, I guess it's time to change the oil. This one's black" ....

* * *
... this is one of those frequently forwarded, text-only funnies that circulate in cyberspace or get retold at workplace water coolers ... if you've heard it you may have cracked a smile or cranked out a chuckle ... chances are you didn't bust a gut ... taken simply as a piece of humor there's a certain inconspicuousness about it ... a standard set-up, a good rhythmic build-up ... and a snappy punchline to sum-up ... painting a vivid picture in the mind ...

... Methuselah breeds with twenty-something, again! ... plenty room for humor here ... yet, hardly had the second chortle escaped from my throat, when I questioned why the ending proved so unexpected and effective ... had I subconsciously defaulted to the assumption the subjects were white? ... with ages being the only descriptives the very first indicator that they were indeed white was the very last word in the joke ... hence the racial assumption was made to the common default ... white, unless otherwise specified ... if not, why the bada-bing?

... don't feel no way ... I am not re-publishing this joke here to daisychain the humor but instead to explore themes of race, racism and racialism ... words as powerful as we make them ...

... in this dispensation of time, as the eloquence of Peter Tosh might refer to the here-and-now, while we are experiencing a re-invigorated bangarang around race issues, it is important to consider variables in perspectives ... so ... while it's true that the joke could be re-tooled to apply in other demographic circumstances, it is also true that this version wouldn't work without some basic assumptions ...

... comedy must always have been a medium for testing public resistance to race talk ... I am remembering the mid-seventies spotlight on Richard Pryor and his in-yo-face challenges to society's ostrich approach to racisms ... I'm certain the influential comic who gave us 1974's "That Nigger's Crazy" would have had something to add to the joke of the old cracker cuckold and the bastard tarbaby ...

... the revolution is being televised and it will be blogged too ... conventional and virtual media carry power to balance out the default eurocentricities in the collective subconscious ... comedy and a sense of humor is a must ... compulsory ... jokes release tensions, sometimes after raising them ... one time sweet, next time salt another time bitter as gall ...

... I will peep more jokes and laugh at more foolishness ... maybe generate some of both on my own ... this picture of an elderly gent and his companion came in my e-mail a week before the joke did ... I couldn't resist associating the two ... a judiciously-juxtaposed visual can aid a story ... to this end I'll take it upon myself to suggest posting the image with the joke for the remainder of its shelf-life as humor-of-the-day ... it doesn't prefigure the punchline nor does it require a default assumption ...






... and somehow still ...

in the end,
bottom line ...

Gramps has got himself a brand new bag ... and Ellie-Mae got a whole lotta 'splainin' to do! ...