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Identity News, Color Blues, & Ethnic Dues, Part One

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(President Lincoln understood that) (s)lavery remains the central most dispositive truth of American history. "And thus spake Abraham: Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-men's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.'

And we could rub the readers nose in the fact--these are as close to 'facts,' in any event, as we'll ever get in relation to the past--that the recompense, the remuneration, the payback, for the two and a half centuries under the law of the lash has yet to clear the bank of history. 'Jim Crow,' as we saw yesterday, and viciousness to make the blood flowing from the screen in Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining' seem like a mere sprinkling of mist, have predominated in relation to the 'Black Man's Burden' of carrying the profitability of capital on his sturdy shoulders.

Closing our eyes to this tale, even if we don't want to hear it, may contravene an easy path to a decent future. The long knives of systematic gore and carnage are capable of popping up quite quickly. We have little time, very possibly, to 'straighten up and fly right,' as my momma always liked to say."

Now that's a really long quotation from an analysis that the Spindoctor composed seven years ago almost. It's over 30,000 words long, and maybe a hundred people have read it. Unfortunately, everybody on the planet ought to check it out, not that this assertion, or its possible truth, make much difference.

Fitzpatrick Color Chart

Undaunted nevertheless then,finally, another longform report argued that "The Race Trap" has become an insidious aspect of contemporary culture and politics. It gives the most comprehensive and racially-centered aggregation of the Spindoctor approach to these thorny elements of the current context.

To wit:

"If a prime purpose of thinking and study and discussion and learning ends up as something like reasonable action that improves human life, then the overwhelming majority of SOP mediation that happens today in this largely intellectual and dialogic sphere is, viewed most optimistically, counterproductive and absurd. This assertion might appear quixotic and clearly makes a disputatious claim. However, this essay will contend that at least provisionally it proves that contention, in relation more exactly to broadcast or otherwise distributed discourse about social conflict that reputedly involves 'race,' 'racial differences,' 'racism,' and so forth.

In essence, because precisely one human race exists, 'racism' only addresses a socially developed concept about a false idea, that different races with different biological qualities in fact are a part of the human condition, a popular and yet completely incorrect conceptualization of human social relations that inevitably colors and distorts what happens among diverse social actors, probably in a completely toxic, and ultimately in a totally self-destructive, fashion. --

This does not mean that color prejudice and White supremacy don't exist. On the contrary, "At least as much as any other correlative, the capacity to resist force against oneself or one's friends or one's family is a sine qua non of social potency. In the United States, the uncounted thousands of police and vigilante murders--and hundreds of thousands of assaults--each decade fall with such massive disproportion on people of color, and Black folk first among these assaulted populations, that any notion that chance determines this fate must look surreal. The very fact of the disparity is explosively ubiquitous at all compass points, both ideological and cultural, in mediated assessments from every possible place on our planet. "

(Moreover), (t)he American Civil Liberties Union summarizes (another aspect of) this malicious and detrimental incongruity, irreconcilable with anything other than vicious injustice, double-dealing, and purposeful division: "Even though whites outnumber blacks five to one and both groups use and sell drugs at similar rates, African-Americans comprise: 35% of those arrested for drug possession; 55% of those convicted for drug possession; and 74% of those imprisoned for drug possession.

This skewed enforcement of drug laws has a devastating impact. One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 are currently either on probation, parole, or in prison. One in five black men have been convicted of a felony. In seven states, between 80% and 90% of prisoners serving time for drug offenses are black. "

(Literally scores of additional examples of discrimination and vicious supremacist thinking show up. However), (a)gain, coloration, or race, does not cause or play a significant role in this opportunism and exploitation: these malefactors come in all shades. What turns out to be dispositive, again and again and again and again--and again--are the twin factors of geopolitical strategy, along with its scramble for resources and markets, on the one hand, and the capacity to control and dispose of vast armies of labor and muscle, as well as buckets of cash, on the other hand. Skin color just doesn't explain either the political economic tangles or the socioeconomic conundrums that capital causes in these struggles and then solves to its own advantage until working people of different colors--can anyone present say Cuba?!--have united to oppose bourgeois overlords. "

Arundhati Roy in 2013

Perhaps a brilliant epigram from Arundhati Roy, a multihued writer of color, gives form and thrust to what the Spindoctor has been developing here.

'Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness -- and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling -- their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

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The original 'odd bird,' my stint as head of High School ROTC included my wearing MFS's black armband just before I turned down an appointment to West Point to go to Harvard. There, majoring in bridge, backgammon, and poker for my middle years as (more...)
 
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