To be clear, Rosa Parks left us a deliberate legacy of activism, not an accidental activist moment. Furthermore, she, like many other Black women, should not be remembered in the shadows of Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. or any other Black male civil rights activist, but rather right alongside of them. We must realize and teach that when Rosa Parks was helping lay the foundation for the civil rights movement, Dr. King was still in high school.

- From “Black Herstory: Rosa Parks Did Much More than Sit on a Bus,” in Ms. Magazine

Felecia Young remembered the day she walked into the Forrest County Courthouse in Hattiesburg, Miss. with her 11-year-old son, 9-year-old daughter, and mother on August 17, 1998.

The streets were barricaded. Buildings and streets showed the faces of police officers who were on site in case of a riot. An Aryan organization had threatened to demonstrate. But Young was determined to bear witness.

She and her children found seats in the balcony of the humid, packed courthouse.

“We sat in the balcony area, way up high,” Young said. “I don’t think I’d ever seen that area open, but they had to open it because there were so many people coming that there wasn’t any where to sit downstairs.”

Young is a black woman, born and raised in Hattiesburg. She attended high school there and graduated from the local college, the University of Southern Mississippi.

After serving six years in the Air Force, during which she visited or lived in 13 countries and earned the rank of captain before her commitment was fulfilled, she returned home, where she and her husband decided to raise their family. It was there where she became familiar with the Ku Klux Klan and its acts of violence. And the charismatic leader of the Klan’s Mississippi White Knights, Sam Bowers, was perhaps the most hateful person of them all.

At the courthouse, Young felt anxious, anticipatory, and inquisitive at beginnings of Bowers’ trial – his fifth trial, in fact, for the murder of Vernon Dahmer Sr. 22 years earlier. She wanted to take in the moment. Most of all, she wanted her children to see Bowers and to remember people like him are real. They exist.

“I wanted (my children) to have that historical perspective,” Young said. “A lot of people have sacrificed their lives so that you could have a better life than they had had.”

Bowers’ hate of all colors and creeds not his own was well known in the South.

“Sam Bowers lived a life consumed with hate for African Americans,” Vernon Dahmer Jr. told the New York Times in 2006. “He caused a lot of pain, suffering and death for many individuals and families in my race. During his life, he never apologized or asked for forgiveness for his actions.”

For Young, the Klan was not an urban legend but very real, frightful terrorist organization. She recalled the terrifying moment when it became real to her as a child.

“At some point, we had some people come by, some white people drive by our house,” she said. “My grandfather was sitting on the front porch with his walking cane in his lap. And they stopped. They slowed down and stopped like they were going to do something. We think they thought he had a shotgun or some kind of gun in his lap, and they drove off real fast.”

Dahmer was a grocery store owner and a known civil rights activist, allowing blacks to pay their poll tax in his grocery store, paying for the right to vote. Bower had threatened to punish the elder Dahmer if he didn’t put a stop to his efforts. Like others in Hattiesburg, Dahmer refused. Others like Peggy Jean Connor.

Connor is Young’s mother. She also allowed Hattiesburg’s black citizens to pay their poll tax at her business, Jean’s Beauty Shop at 510 Mobile Street, and knew of Dahmer’s work in the community.

Connor, who turns 80 years old in October, became a licensed beautician at 14. She began another career after her salon went out of business, as a nurse technician at Forrest General Hospital, and held it down for 27 years.

She was secretary treasurer for the Council of Federated Organization in 1963, while teaching citizenship classes for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at True Light Baptist Church in Hattiesburg. She was executive secretary of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and was arrested for picketing in front of the Forrest County Courthouse in 1964. She sued the governor of Mississippi – and, on May 31, 1977, she won. Two years later, she received the Carter G. Woodson Award for Courage in Civil Rights.

And, at the time of Bower’s threats, she paid the poll tax.

(l-r) Marie Blalock, Peggy Jean Connor and Vassie Patton. Courtesy of RJ Young

“During that time, you had to pay poll tax to register to vote before you could vote,” Connor said; the tax had to be paid for two consecutive years in order to qualify for registration. “So we were trying to collect poll tax from people who were afraid to go to the courthouse to pay their poll tax.”

And people did. They trusted people like Connor and Dahmer to go in their stead to the courthouse to pay their poll tax for them. But the Klan didn’t choose to come after Connor and her family; it chose to go after Dahmer and his.

The poll tax was deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1937. Mississippi was one of five states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Texas and Virginia, that upheld the poll tax. The twenty-fourth amendment, which sought to outlaw the poll tax, was submitted to the states for ratification on Sept. 24, 1962. The amendment’s ratification came on Jan. 23, 1964, outlawing the poll tax in federal elections.

Of the 50 states, Mississippi is the only one to reject the twenty-fourth amendment. The Supreme Court ruled the poll tax unconstitutional in all state elections with a 6-3 vote in 1966, but that decision came a few months too late for Dahmer.

On Jan. 10 of that year, two cars full of white men in white hoods spilled 12 gallons of gasoline on his home under the cover of night. His wife, Ellie, and two small children awoke to the sound of gunfire and the sight of black smoke. Inhaling smoke and badly burned, Dahmer defended his family against the hooded attackers and did his best to extinguish the flames, but there was too much damage. Both his home and his store burned to the ground.

The next morning, Connor said, she went to see the remains.

“It was still smoking,” she said. “I went to the hospital to visit him and he and his daughter were in the room together. He was in one bed and she was in another. And he was talking. I was just shocked when I heard that he had died. It hadn’t been an hour when I left the hospital and heard that he was dead. I couldn’t believe that.”

Dahmer died the next. He was 57. President Lyndon B. Johnson later sent a telegram to his wife, Ellie, expressing “deep concern and shock” over the attack.

“His work was in the best tradition of a democracy,” the President wrote. “His family can be justly proud as his work was a fine example of good citizenship.”

Young heard about the crime from her grandfather, John Henry Gould. She was eight years old.

“I was really small,” she said. “But I was really aware of the Civil Rights Movement and what my mama and my granddaddy where trying to accomplish. I remember somebody coming by to tell my grandfather that Vernon Dahmer had been killed and burnt out.”

Bowers was convicted of murder by a jury that consisted of six minority jurors and sentenced to life in prison, 32 years after his crime. He died in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at 82.

In the wake of Dahmer’s death, the Civil Rights Movement came into its own and permanently adjusted the lens through which race and class are viewed. It has ushered in much needed legislation and forced elected officials to become more transparent and vigilant while in office.

Hattiesburg elected its first black mayor, Johnny DuPree, in 2001. After achieving reelection twice, he is still in office. Last year, DuPree became the first black person to win a major party nomination to run for governor of Mississippi since Reconstruction, and he, like Connor, has urged young people to vote. But Connor is worried that the right to vote has become so impressed upon young people that they have become numb to it.

“It worries me that right here in Hattiesburg (young people) don’t think it’s necessary for them to do that,” she said. “You have to just plead with them to go and register. And then after registering, you have to beg them to go and vote.  A lot of people don’t think it was as bad as it was back in the Fifties and Sixties.”

But perhaps there is hope for this generation:  Circle, the center for information and research on civic learning and engagement, reported 23 million Americans under the age of 30 turned out to vote in 2008. The Times reported young black voters led all ethnic groups in voter turnout for the first time ever.

The socioeconomic results of the Civil Rights Movement could be best depicted in the lives of Connor’s two grandchildren. Both attended a predominantly white elementary school, Presbyterian Christian School, in that same Hattiesburg.

The 11-year-old son, this writer, has graduated from the University of Tulsa and is beginning his last semester of coursework in route to his master’s degree at the University of Oklahoma. The 9-year-old daughter is now majoring in biosystems and agricultural engineering at Oklahoma State University.

Neither child has ever been convicted of a crime. Both are registered voters. Both exercise that right.

By Arturo R. García

As Black History Month gets underway, a particular piece of history has attracted attention after being posted online.

The letter, dated Aug. 7 1865, was originally published in the New York Daily Tribune before being reprinted last month in The Freedmen’s Book, a free collection of letters produced as part of Project Gutenberg for public consumption. The Tribune, of course, was also the newspaper that first published Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents of A Slave Girl in serialized form, including this entry from 1963:

My mother was held as property by a maiden lady; when she marries, my younger sister was in her fourteenth year, whom they took into the family. She was as gentle as she was beautiful. Innocent and guileless child, the light of our desolate hearth! But oh, my heart bleeds to tell you of the misery and degradation she was forced to suffer in slavery. The monster who owned her had no humanity in his soul. The most sincere affection that his heart was capable of, could not make him faithful to his beautiful and wealthy bride the short time of three months, but every stratagem was used to seduce my sister. Mortified and tormented beyond endurance, this child came and threw herself on her mother’s bosom, the only place where she could seek refuge from her persecutor; and yet she could not protect her child that she bore into the world. On that bosom with bitter tears she told her troubles, and entreated her mother to save her.

And oh, Christian mothers! you that have daughters of your own, can you think of your sable sisters without offering a prayer to that God who created all in their behalf! My poor mother, naturally high-spirited, smarting under what she considered as the wrongs and outrages which her child had to bear, sought her master, entreating him to spare her child. Nothing could exceed his rage at this what he called impertinence. My mother was dragged to jail, there remained twenty-five days, with Negro traders to come in as they liked to examine her, as she was offered for sale. My sister was told that she must yield, or never expect to see her mother again.

Anderson’s letter to his former master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, resurfaced again Monday when it was posted on Letters of Note, an archival site that had already garnered attention from the likes of GQ Magazine in the past. And in the past 48 hours, the letter’s been mentioned on Yahoo, BoingBoing–which reported that both the Colonel and Jourdan’s existences had been confirmed–and other outlets.

Courtesy of The Freedmen’s Book, Jourdon Anderson’s letter is under the cut, in its entirety.

Dayton, Ohio,

August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.

By Guest Contributors Kendra James and Jordan St. John

Never seen The Vampire Diaries? Here’s a synopsis (with spoilers). There’s Elena (Nina Dobrev) the “average” popular orphan girl in Mystic Falls, VA. Caroline ( Candice Accola) her blond haired, blue eyed cheerleading frenemy and Bonnie (Kat Graham) her requisite black best friend and side kick. Elena also happens to be the spitting image of a vampire, Katherine, who loved Damon and Stefan Salvatore (brothers played by Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley) in the same town during the Civil War. Come 2009 the brothers return to Mystic Falls, only to both fall in love with Elena – a plot that makes just as much sense now as it did when TVD actually debuted as a book series in the early 1990s. But hey, let’s go with it.

Elena fell in love with Stefan during the show’s first season, but now things are heating up between her and Damon. It’s a crazy ride of a show but one of the most fascinating things is its strange dance with race. Set in the current south but with self-professed ties to the Civil War era and more recently precolonial America, as Dr. Sayantani DasGupta wrote for Racialicious last year, the show sometimes doesn’t know what to do with pesky issues like racism and slavery. As the show’s third season resumes this week, let’s look back at the racial implications and issues of the residents of Mystic Falls since the Season 2 finale.

Why We Love It

Kendra: In a media world saturated with vampires, werewolves, witches, and other secret societies, the show, now a mainstay on The CW network, has gone on to easily become my favorite hub of angsty supernatural teenage adventures. The cheesy premise disguises a surprisingly smart show that, once it found its’ stride during the first season, keeps me hooked with its nearly weekly cliffhangers and lead female characters who usually go out of their ways to be the anti-Bella Swan.

Jordan: I second that. TVD moves faster than any other show on television. Some subplots most series would spend half a season developing, unfold in the course of one episode (such as last season’s finale, where Elena’s Aunt/Guardian, father and brother all died in about a 15-minute span). And in a teen pop-culture landscape that is sometimes obsessed with female frailty and chastity, Elena isn’t even asked to apologize for simultaneously dating two brothers, and neither is Katherine. Yes, the women sometimes require saving but with a powerful female witch and vampire in the mix, they do the saving as well.

Why It’s Still A CW Show

Kendra: Like we said earlier, the show anchors itself in the American past and deals with it in some curious – and problematic – ways, often featuring flashbacks to the Civil War and present-day town events influenced by it. I wish I could understand why everyone’s decided vampires are all Southern these days, but that’s where we are, and TVD will always, to me, be a younger and better version of True Blood. But it’s not perfect. The show’s writers could have easily acknowledged the racial and social issues that come with placing yourself within the context of war and tackled the issues head on, instead of dancing around as True Blood tends to do.

Jordan: Alas, TVD goes a couple steps forward – adding Bonnie as a main character (and a whole line of black witches) and including a Civil War era Asian vampire, Pearl, and then stumbles back by shying away from addressing the legacy of slavery in the American south and falling into stereotypes. I usually applaud color blind casting in fantasy or supernatural (the only reason I watch Merlin is because they made the future Queen Guinevere multiracial. If you are in a fictional place where dragon’s talk, I applaud it when producers do not carryover our preconceptions of race) but that only works when the setting is another world – not the current American south.

The Mystic Falls Civil War Fetish

Kendra: Moving the Salvatore brothers’ history into the Civil War had to be an extremely conscious decision on the part of series creator and producer Kevin Williamson and his team, because none of that is actually a part of author L.J. Smith’s original books, in which the Salvatores were both supposedly turned during the Italian Renaissance.

Now, I can understand why he did it: True Blood was already popular by the time TVD premiered, and the public showed it loved them some southern vampires. And a war on American soil is something the main TVD audience (Americans in the 18-35 demographic) is going to know more about and possibly find more relatable than something going on in Italy. But it never fails to amaze me how a well documented period in American history can be glossed over so thoroughly, and I always wonder why it’s a period chosen so frequently as a media plot device when no writing staff is actually brave enough to use it for what it really was.

A friend of mine jokingly said to me that the show must take place in some sort of alternate America where the War somehow didn’t end as badly, no one in the south is resentful about it, and it wasn’t a complete disadvantage to be a person of color in the south during and before the 1860s. Mystic Falls is presented as an idyllic town where attractive men dress in Rebel Greys and the women dress in Southern Belle gowns for various town occasions, where Black servants during the war were referred to as ‘handmaidens’, and where a fully multicultural town (including Asians!) was perfectly normal for Virginia in 1865.

So why obsess over the conflict if you’re not going to acknowledge it for what it was?

Jordan: TVD seems to be pulling a Bagger Vance – and if you ever want to see a movie with a black main character in the south completely gloss over race, it is a truly striking example; I literally wrote a paper on it. In most of the flashbacks, we have Bonnie’s ancestor, Emily Bennett serving Katherine: She provides her with a ring to walk around in the daylight and also provides daywalking ring for the newly turned Salvatore brothers. While I understand the need for Emily to assist with a number of plot points, I am disappointed that they never take the time to look at Emily as a dynamic character. What is her backstory? Why is a black witch who has the power to control humans and vampires, staying with an evil, murderous vampire in the Civil War era south? Why is she helping her? Emily does always put her own family first whenever her or any of her descendants are threatened, but the lack of time spent looking into her motivations is a glaring omission.

All I need is a nod to slavery – an acknowledgement that there is another facet to the plantation era American south that was not about bonnets, balls and “servants” who all happened to share a skin tone. True Blood has its own faults, but the scene when Tara asked if Bill ever had slaves will always have a place in my heart.

TVD has rare instances of this kind of honesty that I appreciate. I love that earlier in the series, when a southern matriarch is asked by her son about a dungeon on their old plantation property (which actually was used to chain up werewolves) she assumed it had been used to hold slaves and told him in terse terms that it wasn’t something the family liked to discuss before quickly moving on to other things. There are ways to incorporate the darker parts of southern history into the plot but they take a little effort and creativity. All too often, the show shirks from the challenge and opts to gloss over the realities of the Civil Was era. For example, the Salvatores were people of stature in a southern, plantation town, meaning they would have certainly owned slaves. I would love for at least one person to acknowledge that – preferably Bonnie.

Kendra: While watching the mid-season premiere, I was asked, “Why is Emily Bennett still holding that grudge against the Salvatores? It’s been over a century!” a question that pinpoints the problem with dodging the town’s history of slavery. To me, even peeling away the vampiric elements of the story, I have absolutely no problem imagining why Emily, a powerful Black woman would continue to hold a grudge against two rich (potentially slave holding), southern white men from she’d known in 1865. I wish there was someone in that writer’s room willing to take a non-white perspective into account. Not only do I find it problematic that my own view isn’t acknowledged, it’s concerning to me that this idyllic view of the Confederate South is presented without question or discourse to a large swath of young, white CW-watching America.

Romanticizing and whitewashing the African-American experience isn’t a new occurrence (see: Gone With The Wind or Douglas Sirk’s remake of Imitation of Life, to name a few), and it’s troubling to see the trend surface again in 2012. To be fair, this show isn’t the only pop culture phenom guilty of peddling a “safer” version of Southern America and Confederate history to the American youth. It’s simply the most recent. Acts like Taylor Swift and Lady Antebellum, and programs like its’ CW compatriot Hart of Dixie all conjure up images of the “Safe South” in their descriptions (lyrically) and depictions (visually) of the region.

Now, I’m not recommending that today’s youth get their history lessons from the CW and Taylor Swift, but the fact remains that even I, as a young Black kid, was drawn into the romanticism of the Old South. A visceral book description (visceral for an 8-10 year old, at least) of my American Girl Doll, Addy, being forced to eat grubs off a tobacco leaf by her overseer fixed that up right quick, and I suppose I worry that others –white and Black– aren’t going to receive the same historical wake up call if Lady Antebellum, Taylor Swift, and TVD are the only influences to shape their impressions of the South. Paying attention in history class plays a part, yes, but a visual and a pretty face go a long way.

Elena Gilbert as Scarlett O’Hara

Kendra: Elena is clearly supposed to be the Scarlett O’Hara of the Civil War-obsessed Mystic Falls. They’re positioned next to each other in the season two finale: two dark haired, strong, southern women of different periods. As the season two finale progresses into chaos, so does Scarlett’s world on the screen in the town center. At one point Elena is literally shown as Scarlett, with the crumbling Mystic Falls taking the place of Scarlett’s burning Atlanta.

The writers had to know what they were doing. I understand that they were trying to highlight the idea of Elena being a strong female character, but was that really the message conveyed through Scarlett? A woman who (forgetting her numerous other flaws), is in the end left crying over a man on a staircase? It seems to go against the character Elena’s been built to be so far, and drags her back into Bella territory.

Jordan: The Gone with the Wind picnic viewing party in the season 2 finale left me deeply conflicted. As usual, there was a lot going on: Elena was fresh off of her resurrection, Damon was dying, his brother Stefan was bargaining for Damon’s life, Katherine was prowling about causing mischief, and there was a murderous ancient vampire/werewolf hybrid on the loose. Also, I know many black people like Gone with the Wind. It’s romantic, dramatic and an epic in every sense of the word. Clark Gable looks dashing as Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh is a breathtaking Scarlett. Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy even earned her an Academy Award, making her the first African American woman to get one (another conversation for another day, especially with all attention The Help is getting this awards season.) I will also confess to having some baggage with the film that probably stems from first being exposed to it in a fourth grade social studies class when my teacher tried to pass it off as a “supplement” to our chapter on the Civil War (my mother flipped out).

That said, even the staunchest GWTW fan has to admit that its portrayal of African Americans and African American women is flawed to say the least. Mammy and Prissy are one dimensional and stereotypical. They exist only to be Scarlett’s support system and comic relief. Rather than an oppressive, brutal institution where one set of people owned another, slavery comes across as a mutually beneficial, codependent relationship infused with friendship and loyalty and lacking any trace of violence and negativity.

Sure, the people of Mystical Falls might want to gloss over all of that and get caught up in the fabulous costumes, but Bonnie should know better. I can’t buy that she had not a moment of discomfort seeing women who look like her ancestors lampooning themselves on the screen. Even in this crazy town, she’s a teen and she wants to fit in, but for the souls of her dead ancestors, I needed her to say something. Not a whole rant – just a comment and side eye.

Kendra: And that’s what, once again, proves that there’s no one with our eye writing this show. You’re right– it didn’t need to be much. We didn’t need a speech, or a neck roll, or anything else obvious or elaborate. If Bonnie had just raised an eyebrow as she sat down at that picnic and said, “really though?” that would have been enough for me. It would have showed that yes, she’s grown up here, and she’s used to their foolishness, but she knows what’s up and she has a voice. Color blind casting is wonderful, but if you’re going to turn a character who was a white Irish-American Druid in the books into an African-American descendant of slaves in the American South, don’t half-ass it.

White Settlers, Native Werewolves, and one Black Witch: Is Anyone Parenting Bonnie Bennett? And Other Pertinent Questions

Jordan: I find it interesting that all of the main characters are given some backstory on their parents, home life and support system. While Bonnie is connected to her witch ancestors, after her grandmother’s passing there has been little to no talk of Bonnie’s home life. We never see a sibling, mother or father. Where she lives and who is looking after her seems to be a non issue. While other characters are given plenty to rely on, Bonnie is given no one and her strength is taken for granted. She asks for help when she needs it but leans on no shoulders and looks after herself. Why is it assumed that in a cast of characters including ancient and immortal beings, the lone black character can go it alone? Another insidious example of the strong black woman archetype playing out or a plot point they have been a little lazy about?

One of the most fascinating things about the series is that just about every black character who emerges from the background is a witch or warlock. In flashbacks showing us the ancestors of the current vampires in the TVD-verse, Ayanna, a witch of African descent warns them not to cast the spell that turns them into vampires but even before doing so, she appears to be helping them while they’re human, for reasons unknown. Likewise, one of the series’ key plot points – where there are vampires, there are witches – is never explained. Why are the witches, like Emily and Bonnie, placed in this position? They’re described as “servants of nature,” but they aid and work for creatures that are seen as abominations, with no explanation as to what is in it for them. Why are they situated as servants, and who exactly are they serving?

Kendra: You mentioned Mammy and Prissy from GWTW before, and I would argue that Bonnie, while not a slave, is essentially fulfilling that role as a support system. Bonnie is the one that every white character, even Stefan, runs to when they need help. This isn’t unique to her, since, as you’ve said, every vampire who appears on the show seems to have their very own Black witch or warlock in their back pockets, but very rarely do we find out anything else out about these characters. Bonnie’s father’s family is usually mentioned towards the beginning of the new season (she apparently spends her summers with them) but we’ve never met them, or her mother. Among the younger characters, Elena and Caroline both found parental figures, as did minor characters like Jeremy Gilbert  and Tyler Lockwood still has his mother. Yet Bonnie gets nothing, aside from my dreams where Stacy Dash and Shemar Moore are cast as her parents.

Aside from a father and son unit we saw last season, these witches and warlocks often have no families, no support, and no motivation aside from serving the vampires they’re called to. All the vampires have allies. Bonnie, on the other hand, consistently acts as an ally while having none of her own. Regardless of race, I have to imagine that this would be hard on any teenager, and it’s a strange choice to not address the toll it takes on her.

I do think that the show has tried to explain this relationship off with the introduction of one of the original vampires, Klaus and his family into the new world and his mother’s friendship with Ayanna (who, by the way, seemed to be a very unfortunate knock-off of Pirates of the Caribbean‘s Tia Dalma). Ideally, the show would give us further explanation rooted in the fact that the witch was there when the first vampires were created. Granted, now that they’ve introduced the Fell doctor (rumored to be a witch, which begs another question: where do White witches come from in this universe?) I worry that they’ll completely ignore giving us an explanation now that they have shiny new white toys to play with. But for it to not become just another analogy about Blacks serving whites in the South, they really do need to fill in the holes in the show’s mythology.

My last point of interest involving the mid-season flashback was the implication that Tyler’s family comes from a long line of werewolves that were there before Klaus’ family showed up, as hinted by the cave drawings below Tyler’s family’s property. The show is obviously not committed to staying within a proper historical context, but does that mean that the Lockwoods are of Native descent? Are we talking skin-walkers instead of werewolves (forgetting the fact that Virginia would be the wrong area for the prevalence of that belief; I assume they just wouldn’t care)? And if we are going to learn anything about the Lockwood family history, is the writing team’s handling of it going to make me want to shoot my television?

Jordan: Yeah, the jury is still out on that one. I am not holding my breath for a thorough exploration of Native American skin-walker mythology. That episode is probably as likely as one explaining why most of TVD’s African American witches have distinctly light coloring. The writers might feel that takes too much time away from their picturesque plantation flashbacks. Snark aside, I was pleased to see that we’re finally supposed to see Bonnie’s mother soon. I am looking forward to meeting that witch – it’s a start, right?

By Arturo R. García

I won’t lie – I was skeptical when I first heard George Lucas was appearing on The Daily Show to promote his new Tuskegee Airmen story Red Tails. On the surface, it represented a missed opportunity: the film centers around four black characters, with a cast that includes Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Ne-Yo – why weren’t any of them getting some face-time with Jon Stewart?

Lucas’ appearance ended up being a pleasant surprise. But, both he and Stewart left one important question hanging.

In the interview, Lucas reiterated some arguments he made to USA Today last week: Tails, it took 23 years for the film to reach the big screen, was an effort he financed himself – and one he said studios refused to get behind.

“I figured I could get the prints and ads paid for by the studios,” Lucas said, “and that they would release it and I showed it to all of them and they said, ‘No, we don’t know how to market a movie like this. It’s not green enough.’ They only release green movies.”

By “green,” of course, he means money-makers – and in Hollywood parlance, that really means … well, you know. Not Black.

Stewart, unfortunately, dances around the issue. He asks Lucas, “Is it because of the pedigree of it?” and talks about Lucas discussing it in terms of an “economic and political reality” without noting any of the factors that go into forming that reality. While Stewart would be quick to point out that he’s a comedian first and a “newsman” far down the list, it’s a moment that might have benefited from Stephen Colbert’s willingness to push the envelope. (Though Lucas sneaks in a nasty little dig: “It’s not Glory, where you have a lot of white officers run these guys into cannon fodder.”)

To his credit, Lucas admitted to USA Today that his efforts could have an adverse affect on black filmmakers:

“I realize that by accident I’ve now put the black film community at risk (with Red Tails, whose $58 million budget far exceeds typical all-black productions). I’m saying, if this doesn’t work, there’s a good chance you’ll stay where you are for quite a while. It’ll be harder for you guys to break out of that (lower-budget) mold. But if I can break through with this movie, then hopefully there will be someone else out there saying let’s make a prequel and sequel, and soon you have more Tyler Perrys out there.”

But Lucas also seems to be challenging – or at the very least, counting on – his well-established fanbase in selling the movie. Instead of distancing Tails from his defining work, Lucas says, “It’s exactly like Star Wars,” in terms of the size of the story he ultimately wants to tell, and later says, “This is as close as you’ll ever get to Episode VII.” Those efforts have carried over into social media; the official Star Wars Twitter account was posting images from the film’s premiere. And that now becomes the key question: will the Lucas fanbase rally around to support him? Or is it more willing to watch aerial dogfights when they’re based on a galaxy far, far away, rather than on a step forward in U.S. military history?

Native Science understands that nature is technology – a compost pile is a massively-tested super-applicable multifaceted waste management system resulting from four billion years of research and development where you put food waste in and get high-yield fertilizer out and the whole process is carbon neutral!

I imagine a Steampunk North America (Turtle Island) in which the buffalo population wasn’t deliberately eradicated for genocidal purposes and which thus still enjoys the resources of vast areas of tall grass prairie (you need buffalo to have prairie as much as you need prairie to have buffalo because many seeds will not germinate correctly or thrive without passing through a buffalo’s digestive system unless human intervention is applied). I imagine a Turtle Island in which deforestation is severely curtailed and vast areas of old-growth forest are deliberatly maintained. I imagine city architecture utilizing rammed-earth walls and green roofs on large communal buildings, and time-tested local building technologies on smaller, private residences. I imagine populous cities designed for walkability and communal pedestrian culture. I imagine a North America in which the Black Hills are not defaced with gigantic carved graffiti of doofy white dudes.

By the 19th century in my alternate timeline, Turtle Island has a thriving, technologically advanced pan-Indian culture, a collective of independent nations with distinct regionalisms that has a UN-like organization to engage with the global community. A group of nations that meets Europe as equals and trades technology and cultural influences as such.

- From “Musing About Native Steampunk”

“I remember your grandfather leaving the house in blackface to perform at the local Jewish community center,” my mom told me. “They just didn’t know what it meant back then,” she explained, “not until after WW II.” As an activist involved in contemporary solidarity work across racial lines, I was shocked to discover this racist history in my near past. As an Ashkenazi Jew* (of European descent) whose grandparents immigrated to the US around the turn of the century, I don’t always see myself implicated in the American legacy of slavery, but I was forced to reconcile the fond memories of my jovial grandfather with this haunting image of him performing racial minstrelsy. Trying to make sense of this image, I began researching the history of Jewish blackface between WWI and WWII and was surprised to discover a connection between my current activism and this history of blackface: When we are not rooted in our Jewish identities, we risk stereotyping, appropriating, and over-identifying with other cultures.

To understand the complicated history of alliance, disconnection, and overlap between Ashkenazi Jews and African Americans in between the world wars, I turned to Eric Goldstein’s The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity, which considers how Jews negotiated competing claims on their identities and Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, which looks more specifically at the role of blackface in Americanizing Jews. As European Jewish immigrants arrived in the US, their presence intersected with the dominant black/white system of racial relations in various ways. At different times, Jews and African Americans were linked tightly together in American consciousness as evidenced by the case of Leo Frank (1913-1915), which sets the stage for Jewish-Black relations in between the wars. A Jewish factory manager in Georgia, Frank was accused of raping and murdering a white girl who worked in his factory. Frank was found guilty (in spite of flimsy evidence) and sentenced to death, but the Governor commuted his sentence to life in prison. A journalist warned in a headline: “The next Jew who does what Frank did is going to get exactly the same thing we give to Negro rapists” (Goldstein 43). Frank was then kidnapped from prison and lynched by a white mob.

In the wake of the Frank trial, Jews who followed the case became “increasingly sensitized both to the danger of comparing blacks and Jews and the possibilities of deflecting anti-Semitism by emphasizing their whiteness” (Goldstein 65). During the trial, Frank’s legal team repeatedly emphasized Frank’s whiteness by downplaying his Jewishness and tried to shift the blame onto a black janitor who was also implicated in the murder. Even as they tried to underscore their whiteness in this time between the wars, Jews were being held responsible for a variety of issues that troubled Americans including communism, immigration, and the rising tide of war in the 1930’s. Articles about “The Jewish Problem” proliferated in the press, and quotas and restrictions were enacted to limit the number of Jews allowed into universities, clubs, and neighborhoods.

Not surprisingly, Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants had a contradictory relationship to African Americans. On the one hand, identification with whiteness allowed Jews to experience “what it was like not to be the focus of national hostility and resentment” as they were in Europe (Goldstein 145). On the other hand, Jews identified with the suffering of African Americans and continued to display empathy for them. The most assertive statements of identification with African Americans in the US occurred in the Yiddish press where non-Jewish readers could not chance upon them. The Yiddish press roundly condemned segregation and racism by comparing race riots against African Americans to the pogroms against Jews in Europe. At the same time, the Yiddish press read Jewish blackface solely as a means of identification by saying about that Jews “knew how to sing the songs of the most cruelly wronged people in the world’s history” (Goldstein 154).

Blacking Out Jewish Identity in The Jazz Singer

In Blackface, White Noise, Rogin discusses how Jewish blackface plays out in The Jazz Singer, one of the first “talkie” films, which came out in 1927 and starred a Jewish actor, Al Jolson, whose life parallels that of the protagonist in the film. The film’s central character, Jakie Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor, is expected to follow in his father’s footsteps by becoming a cantor at their synagogue on Manhattan’s lower East Side. Jakie Rabinowitz, however, wants to sing jazz, which enrages his father, who, in turn, disowns him. (Al Jolson, also the son of a cantor, turned his back on tradition by performing in theater and film). After running away from home, Jakie changes his name to Jack Robin, finds himself a Christian girlfriend, and becomes a singing success on the stage, often performing in blackface. When his father is dying, Jack is called to take his place to sing Kol Nidre, a solemn song performed on the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish days. Forgoing an opening night appearance on the stage, Jack takes his father’s place in the synagogue, and his father forgives him before he dies. The film, however, ends with Jack performing “My Mammy” in blackface at the Winter Garden Theater (where Al Jolson often performed) with his mother and girlfriend in the audience. Singing directly to his mother, Jack gets down on one knee and sings a song about coming home to his “Mammy” in “Alabammy.”

In Rogin’s analysis, he argues that politically oriented Eastern Europe Jews in the US between WWI and WWII identified with African Americans as a persecuted, Diasporic people. While this identification often resulted in political solidarity, it also took the more problematic “form of either cultural or literal blackface as Jews attempted to become American by taking on black-derived music, along with the plantation myth of American belonging” (66). Witnessing anti-Semitism on the rise in both Europe and in the US, US Jews attempted to escape their shtetl pasts by using the mask of blackness. Thus their ability to re-make themselves in the New World as white came at the cost of African Americans, who had to remain immobile and fixed in stereotype.

In The Jazz Singer, Jakie leaves behind his immigrant past (represented by his dying father) through his performance of blackface. Interestingly, very few movies at this time made by Jews (and often starring Jews) actually represented Jewish themes; Jews in Hollywood generally succeeded by erasing Jewishness in their films. Jakie’s story, however, is definitely a Jewish story—one of assimilation. And as Rogin argues, Jack can only express his sadness about leaving his cultural motherland (the lower East Side and Eastern Europe) through a black-white racial lens by equating his Jewish mother with a Southern “mammy.” In the final “Mammy” scene from the film, the camera keeps cutting between Jack singing with great emotion and the face of his crying mother.

As Goldstein observes, Jewish blackface became a means to express emotions that could not be expressed as Jews; blackface obscures the performer’s Jewishness through stereotyping African Americans who became a mask for Jewish expression. This performance blends identification and admiration with racism. Many of the Jews, including Jolson, who performed in blackface, began their careers as Jewish comedians and turned to black material as their urge to assimilate made it less desirable to do comedy about Jewish themes and personas. Of course what they end up taking on isn’t actually African American material, but the white culture’s nostalgia for an even more racist past of very clearly defined racial roles. The “Mammy” stereotype grew out of the reality that African American mothers were often forced to nurse the master’s children during slavery (and then, post-slavery, forced to take care of them as servants) often at the cost of their relationships with their own children. This reality translated into the stereotype of the happy, loyal, desexualized “mammy” whose happiness made white people feel that slavery was a benevolent institution.

Unmasking Jewish Histories

How, then, does my Grandfather fit into all this? His father Max (my great grandfather) came to the US from Poland in 1900 as a shoemaker because his house in Warsaw was burned down in pogroms. Enjoying his life in the New World, Max didn’t want to send for his wife Cecilia and six year old son (my Grandfather) back in Warsaw, but family pressure intervened. When his family did arrive, Max was embarrassed by his wife’s Old World Yiddish speaking ways and began isolating her. He wouldn’t give Cecilia any money, and he didn’t want her to learn English. He apparently refused to let her eat when she was pregnant. The family story is that he drove her crazy, and then put her into an insane asylum. It’s unclear how much English Cecilia could even speak and how much of her diagnosed “craziness” was a result of being an isolated immigrant with limited language skills. Max then put my Grandfather and his sister into an orphanage until he remarried years later.

During my mom’s childhood, her father Maurice–always quick with a joke–never spoke about his childhood, and told both my mom and my aunt that their grandmother (Cecilia) was dead. As an adult, my mom found out that her father and his sister used to go visit their mother at the asylum–a secret that only came out after Cecilia’s death. As part of his own assimilation, Maurice obscured his own sad family history by refusing to let his children meet their grandmother.

Although I don’t know the circumstances surrounding my Grandfather’s use of blackface, I wonder how or whether his own sadness about the loss of his mother and motherland played into it; was he singing to a “mammy” or was he just trying, like his peers, to become a white American? Given that my Grandfather came to the US as a child on a boat from Poland, he certainly didn’t have a plantation past in the South. Neither did Al Jolson, also an immigrant from Eastern Europe, who was known for performing with and fighting discrimination against African Americans on Broadway and later in Hollywood. Was Maurice taking on white America’s nostalgic imagination for a racist past that Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had little part in? What is gained and what gets erased by swapping out these histories? Taking on the history of American racism, Jews also lost connections to our own history and culture.

History Lessons for Solidarity Work

The image of Jews doing blackface represents a sad and pivotal moment in Ashkenazi Jewish American identity. At various moments because of historical cycles of anti-Semitism, Jews have been bribed with material privileges and public positions of limited power to appear as the visible face of an oppressive system. What does it mean that this time the face that they put on was blackface? In these exchanges, Jews are often encouraged to take on a middle “buffer” position, and thus get pitted against other oppressed groups. With blackface, Jews occupied the middle ground once again, this time the ground between African Americans and white Christian culture. We both chose and were encouraged to choose whiteness that came at a cost to our relationships with African Americans and disconnected us from our own culture.

As an adult, disconnected from my own family history, I began asking more questions about my Grandfather and learned even more about sadness and loss in his history. Most of his father Max’s siblings stayed in Poland, and most of my Grandfather’s cousins died in Auschwitz, probably around the same time that he was performing in blackface. It’s hard to fathom how both these things could be happening at the same time; in the US, Ashkenazi Jews were being encouraged to assimilate into whiteness, a process they probably accepted, in part, because in Europe they were being killed as a “race.”

The image of my Grandfather doing blackface embodies a moment when Ashkenazi Jews exchanged our deep connection to our cultures, histories and families in order to gain whiteness. While I want to be clear that blackface has obviously been the most damaging to its targets, African Americans, there has also been a cost to Ashkenazi Jews as well. We have inherited the privileges of assimilation—class and race privilege—as well as some incalculable losses–of culture, community and solidarity/connection with other oppressed people.

Through my involvement in Jewish anti-racist organizing over the last decade, I have come to realize that as Ashkenazi Jews who identify as white, we still face the dual dangers of distancing ourselves from other oppressed groups or over-identifying and appropriating their struggles. Jews doing blackface is an extreme example of this tendency: Ashkenazi Jews moved toward whiteness at the expense of African Americans while using the mask of “blackness” to explore alternative ways to express their emotions from the dominant white Christian culture. Because Ashkenazi Jews have more or less “achieved” whiteness, there is clearly still a tendency to distance ourselves and ignore other oppressed groups’ struggles.

But I have also seen the opposite force at work among anti-racist Ashkenazi Jewish activists. When we do not have any grounding in our own culture, however we define it, it is easy to over-identify with others’ struggles, whether those of Palestinians or other oppressed groups. In our attempts to build alliances, we sometimes overreach and take over other people’s struggles as a way to find culture and meaning for ourselves. At anti-Occupation protests, I have seen many Jews wearing Palestinian symbols, such as keffiyehs as a sign of solidarity. There is nothing inherently wrong with this as long as we are simultaneously working to make space for Palestinian voices in this conversation and not filling up all the space ourselves. I personally find it even more effective to see Jews wearing traditional Jewish symbols at these protests, thereby insisting that we can be our full Jewish selves as we stand up against the Israeli Occupation. Even as we reach out to work in solidarity, it is important stay rooted within our own histories and cultures, as complicated and compromising as they may be.

So while there is no simple lesson to be taken from this messy history of Jewish blackface, I believe that our challenge is to remain connected to Jewishness, whatever that means to us, even as we use our privileges to work toward ally-ship with others. Although I still feel a sense of shame when I picture my Grandfather in blackface, I also try to remember the historical context surrounding his losses and choices. As someone who has reaped the benefits of my ancestors’ compromises, I am lucky that I have the choice to attempt reaching toward solidarity, and resisting appropriation as part of my modern Jewish identity.

–
*Throughout this essay, I am referring to Jews of European descent who “became” white in the US through a process of assimilation at a particular historical moment. I recognize that not all Ashkenazi Jews identify as white; some folks are both Jewish and African American; and finally that Jews of color, including Jews with Sephardic and Mizrahi heritage, may have very different experiences.

By Guest Contributor Gabriel Canada, cross-posted from Racebending

Under happier circumstances, Billie Frechette would have been my great aunt. She toured around the country for five years with my great uncles as part of the “Crime Doesn’t Pay” stage show. There, she recounted her six months with their son and brother John Dillinger–and her own two years in jail that came as a result of her fateful romance with him.

It was true that crime didn’t pay for the family. John Dillinger served several years in prison and was later killed by Federal agents.  People in Indianapolis,  Mooresville or Martinsville were not lining up to risk dating the daughter, or the niece, or even the cousin of a member of the “Dillinger gang.” It was a hard life–and an odd one–because if the family wasn’t making a great deal of money of off John, the media certainly was.

The Crime Doesn’t Pay tour was only a small part of the cachet industry that popped up, whetting the appetite of a gangster crazy nation. It is undeniably strange to see replicas of a relative’s death mask on sale as a collectible alongside wanted posters and wooden guns. Nothing–save perhaps J. Edgar Hoover and his fledgling FBI agency–reaped more from the life and death of John Dillinger than Hollywood.  Soon after his death, Humphrey Boggart would play a fictitious Indiana bank robber in High Sierra (1941)–his break through role as a leading man. Warren Oates, Mark Harmon, and Johnny Depp would follow suit, raking in more money than a bank robber ever could.  Just this week, Leonardo Di Caprio can be seen in the trailer for the biopic J. Edgar (2011) alongside Dillinger’s death mask.

When Hollywood sought to adapt the story of my ill-fated, almost-aunt Evelyn “Billie” Frechette, they made it clear that despite the fact she and her sisters were actresses  they would not have been welcome at the casting call.  She was the victim of “racebending” in its most unadulterated form. The kind that transformed Audrey Hepburn into an “Indian”, saw Michelle Phillips, a singer from the Mommas and the Papas, turned into Billie onscreen. A Menominee girl who grew up on reservation and went to a mission school was portrayed by a white pop star.

What is most infuriating (other than seeing my uncle portrayed as an errant cop killing psychopath, which was far from the truth) is that the film adaptations which include Billie take pains to let the audience know she’s “half Indian,” and more to the point, that she’s been discriminated against because of it.

When we first see her onscreen in Dillinger, Warren Oates tells her “They don’t serve Indians here” and a blonde haired Michelle Phillips explains that it’s okay, it’s her French half that drinks.

The blonde hair should have been the first cue that historical accuracy was not a high priority in 1977, but the opening minutes of the film get much worse for the real life story of Billie and Johnny. He robs the bar and kidnaps her. In the next scene, he introduces her to his gang, calls her an “injun,” and tells them to never let her drink. This is followed by a gratuitous rape scene.

I had high hopes that such terrible inaccuracies wouldn’t be repeated three decades later when Universal Studios took on the retelling of Dillinger’s life for Public Enemies (2009). From the start, historical accuracy was respected with director Michael Mann shooting on location at the banks, hotels, prisons, and hideouts where the real events took place–even going so far as to have his set designer restore many of them, creating tourist havens for local communities. The actors and film makers even descended on the Dillinger family farm.

That is why it was even more disappointing that–though Billie’s romance was central to the plot of this new film and it was closer to the truth in almost every way–”racebending” was still employed, unapologetically.  Marion Cotillard still introduces herself as half-Indian in her first scene. She makes it clear that she’s been scorned for it, saying that most guys don’t like that about her. (I am left with the impression that it isn’t “most guys” who wouldn’t like that about Billie, but rather “most guys in Hollywood.”)

Which is baffling. Michael Mann, the director of Public Enemies, was also the director of Last of the Mohicans and Heat. He played a large part in launching the careers of actors of color like Wes Studi and Eric Schweig in the 1990s. Though Mann keeps the context of Billie’s heritage intact in the film, and has a history of working with First Nation actors, we are left with Cotillard–who, like  Phillips before her, is far removed from the Wisconsin reservation where Frechette lived most of her life. The only way to let the audience know Cotillard is playing an Indian is for the actors to come straight out and say it, as if denied the use of a buckskin dress, Hollywood simply didn’t know how to introduce an audience to a First Nations woman in a speakeasy.

Billie Frechette is the sole heroine in these Dillinger films, where tough guy gangsters are mowed down in hails of bullets and G-men don’t bother to flash their badges before opening fire. Yet, the first thing the film makers want the audience to know is that she is half Indian. It makes me wonder: If that detail about her is so important, why was this overlooked by the casting directors?

We are meant to feel sympathetic for Billie in Public Enemies and Dillinger. Not much good happens to her. She goes to jail and is tortured by the FBI for little more than falling in love with the wrong guy.

The films take pains to suggest she was with that wrong guy because no one wanted to dance or drink with an Indian. Well, if anyone is responsible for that last plight of Billie onscreen, it is Hollywood itself. Crime may not pay, but Hollywood–for whatever reason–still thinks racebending will.

Stewart: Wyatt, what does this say about America?
Cenac: (yelling) It says there aren’t enough black people making maps!

That’s my new answer to everything.

Triple Awesome Score for the America the Beautiful remix. Lord, Wyatt’s going to make me start DVRing The Daily Show again…

Next week, we will discuss why it’s not just about the damn word, but I’m too burned from the week to do it now. Also, file under things to look up when we have time – why “fuck” is bleeped out on TV, but nigger is cool. I’ve been wondering that since the Chappelle’s Show, and then the Boondocks, so at some point, I need to get an answer.

Woman is not the nigger of the world.

John Lennon is not the final authority on whether it’s ok to use the term nigger.

Quoting black men from the 60s is not a valid defense against critiques from black women, black feminists, and our allies today.

The term nigger is not “in the past.”

The term nigger has not, and has never been, a term that can be equally applied to everyone.

Arguing that black people don’t have a monopoly on the term nigger is just fucking disgusting. You want it that bad? Really?

Over on Facebook, the woman posing with the infamous Slutwalk NYC photo (and the woman who created the sign) defended themselves. The tl; dr version of their statements: “It was wrong to use the word nigger, but the song is true!” Here’s the convo:

Christina Jaus How does this photo speak to inclusion?
Yesterday at 11:23am · Unlike · 9 people

Betty Chantel Jesus Christ, this is just shameful! SlutWalk &SlutWalk NYC what do you have to say about this??
Yesterday at 11:29am · Like · 5 people

Nicole Kubon This sign was not made by an organizer and, when it was noticed, an organizer respectfully requested the sign be put away and took some time to talk with the sign holder about why this message was not in line with our cause. Unfortunately we cannot police all attendants to our event, or any event, but it is a sign that was frustrating to all of us and has sparked discussion amongst organizers. We do not agree with the message being displayed here and addressed it as soon as we saw it.
Yesterday at 11:50am · Like · 2 people

Clare Mackay i don’t get the sign. is a word(s) on the poster out of view?
Yesterday at 2:02pm · Like

Amina Ali This is the title of a song written and performed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the 1970s. You have to listen to the whole song to understand it. It is not offensive to anyone other than sexists in its entirety and was a very powerful message, then and now. I can understand how the sign out of this context would be disturbing. But I urge everyone to check out the full lyrics and listen to the song and judge for themselves.
Yesterday at 2:59pm · Like · 6 people

Tyrra Kiri Adrien Ramos Whether the Lennon song is meant to be offensive, that word should just not be said by any white person.
Yesterday at 5:16pm · Like · 6 people

Amina Ali I think it is more productive to look into the deeper meaning of things than to exercise censorship.
Yesterday at 5:20pm · Like · 5 people

Christina Jaus ‎@ Amina, did you talk to any Black people (women or men) in the 60′s and did they themselves tell you at that time that they felt empowered by that John Lennon song?
Yesterday at 5:41pm · Like · 6 people

Christina Jaus And, the sign “out” of context or not is still offensive. When is the N word ever in context outside of dehumanizing?
Yesterday at 5:43pm · Like · 4 people

Erin TheBeatles Clark Woman is the nigger of the world
Yes she is…think about it
Woman is the nigger of the world
Think about it…do something about it

We make her paint her face and dance
If she won’t be a slave, we say that she don’t love us
If she’s real, we say she’s trying to be a man
While putting her down, we pretend that she’s above us

Woman is the nigger of the world…yes she is
If you don’t believe me, take a look at the one you’re with
Woman is the slave of the slaves
Ah, yeah…better scream about it

We make her bear and raise our children
And then we leave her flat for being a fat old mother hen
We tell her home is the only place she should be
Then we complain that she’s too unworldly to be our friend

Woman is the nigger of the world…yes she is
If you don’t believe me, take a look at the one you’re with
Woman is the slave to the slaves
Yeah…alright…hit it!

We insult her every day on TV
And wonder why she has no guts or confidence
When she’s young we kill her will to be free
While telling her not to be so smart we put her down for being so dumb

Woman is the nigger of the world
Yes she is…if you don’t believe me, take a look at the one you’re with
Woman is the slave to the slaves
Yes she is…if you believe me, you better scream about it

We make her paint her face and dance
We make her paint her face and dance
We make her paint her face and dance
We make her paint her face and dance
We make her paint her face and dance
We make her paint her face and dance
16 hours ago · Like · 1 person

Mina Johnson I heard the song…but what you fail to realize is regardless of the context, that word is still hurtful and disrespectful to a lot of people (especially when spoken by a white person). Conjures up a lot of pain and nightmares for many still
10 hours ago · Like · 4 people

Kelly Hannah Peterlinz There was no disrespect, hurt, pain, or offence intended. I don’t think there was one racist person there. I, the one holding the sign, though not the one who made it, would never use that word offensively. The word and it’s meaning is wrong, but the sign is true. There is no contest about it. I am probably the least racist person out there. I have never even mistakenly judged someone by the color of their skin. Don’t judge before you know what is really going on.
9 hours ago · Like · 1 person

Kelly Hannah Peterlinz I did not make the sign, but still feel wrong and sick. I apologize for being photographed with it and would like to ask for it to be taken down. I never thought this experience could make me ashamed or hurt, or even make me cry, but it has. Anyone who has seen photos of me with it please ask for them to be taken down. Erin this is not your fault, I just don’t wish to be hated for a word.
9 hours ago · Like

Kelly Hannah Peterlinz Also, it did not, in fact, take time to convince Erin to out the sign away. Less than twenty seconds of conversation took place. I stood next to Erin as she discussed this with the woman respectfully, on both parts, Erin complied, folded the sign up, and put it in her bag.
9 hours ago · Like · 1 person

Aura Bogado Don’t judge before we know what’s going on? Wha, wha, what? I can see what’s going on: a white girl holding a sign with the n-word on it. You should be ashamed of yourself–and please, stop telling us that this made you cry. You get no sympathy.
8 hours ago · Like · 4 people

Aura Bogado And Erin: STOP WRITING THE FUCKING N-WORD
8 hours ago · Like · 3 people

Aisha Tayo Ijadunola Wow, if women are the niggers of the world what the flying fuck are Black women? Double niggers? And White feminists wonder why women of colour especially Black women don’t want to join them.
6 hours ago · Unlike · 3 people

Emilie Rosenblatt kelly, i searched the web hoping to find some words from you, the woman with the sign, hoping for an explanation. it’s upsetting to me that, even after the fact, even after seeing people’s reactions, even after talking it out with slutwalk organizers, you seem to show no understanding of what your sign meant to so many women, to so many survivors who are women of color. you don’t seem to realize that your carrying that sign made it harder for all of us, because we only win if we unite, and we can only unite when our spaces are safe for everyone’s voices and experiences. i’m white, but if i were a women of color and i saw that sign, i would say, “slutwalk is not a space for me.” and that’s a serious problem. please try to internalize people’s reactions and own your agency in this. take the discomfort that you’re feeling right now and really sit with it, and you can use it to grow.
6 hours ago · Unlike · 4 people

Aura Bogado I blame SlutWalk for creating an institution that supports white supreacy: http://tothecurb.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/slutwalk-a-stroll-through-white-supremacy/
5 hours ago · Like

Erin TheBeatles Clark I’m the one who made the sign, I asked my friend Kelly to hold it for a SECOND while I fixed my bag, and THAT is the picture that’s been circulating.

Like Kelly said ^ when a girl asked me to take it down, I apologized saying it was never meant to offend anyone, and that was that. Very civil, very respectful.

You’re saying the context doesn’t matter but it does! Otherwise the only thing everyone sees is a girl holding a sign that says the “n” word. But it’s a John Lennon song, it’s an incredibly moving, feminist song that inspired me to act as a feminist. And since I love John Lennon more than anything in the world, and because I was attending a feminist protest, I was delighted by the connection I made with the two.

I’m not trying to justify what I did necessarily, the fact is: I offended people and I’ve undermined the Slut Walk, and for that I apologize profusely. I am truly sorry. But please, I never meant any offense or hate.

Also… yes, my skin is white, but I get offended by racist comments!! And I’m not Jewish, but I get offended by antisemitic comments, and I’m not gay but I get offended by homophobe comment– because I’m a fellow HUMAN being, and anything hateful towards my other fellow humans I take offense to……. that’s why I drew a PEACE sign…!! I promise I never intended to be offensive, and I apologize for using the “n” word since that is my crime, for using the “n” word. But I promise, there was absolutely no hatred or violence involved.
4 hours ago · Like · 4 people

Robert Busillo Aura, what you said in your article is true… Slutwalk will do NOTHING to stop the criminalization of black women in New Orleans, nor will it stop one woman from being potentially deported after she calls the police subsequent to being raped.

Slutwalk will also do nothing to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, help me pass my math test, end wars, start wars, or cure AIDS.

Because that’s not what Slutwalk is about. Slutwalk didn’t create this
“institution that supports white supremacy.” Slutwalk was, at best, a group of men and women joining together to make it known that they’re sick and tired of “victim-blaming” in our culture. At worst, it was a bunch of rowdy, hypersexualized young adults and teens with an excuse to dress skimpily and march around yelling tasteless things.

And the sad truth: most of them just really don’t care about the struggles of women of color. They’re privileged, wealthy, and white…. it’s not an issue in their minds.

Also, please stop using the “F” word, it offends me. Also, please don’t use the Lord’s name in vain, and don’t say the “F” slur that refers to homosexual men. Stop being pro-life or pro-choice, because either way, you’ll offend someone who feels just as strongly as you do about the use of the “N” word. You can’t please everybody, so please stop expecting everyone to try to accommodate your hypersensitivity to some words scrawled sloppily on a sign. YOU get no sympathy.
about an hour ago · Like · 2 people

Robert Busillo ‎”I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Margaret Thatcher said that… smart broad.
about an hour ago · Like · 2 people

Dean Busillo ‎Robert Busillo if there was a LOVE button…..
about an hour ago · Like · 2 people

Latoya Peterson I posted a video, on my site, of John Lennon’s rationale for the song. It was a 2 minute song that he spent 9 minutes trying to explain. He also cited support from black male leaders in writing the tune – there was no mention of black feminists like Pearl Cleage who opposed the usage. Aishah Shahidah Simmons has written on this, as have I. The question on I posed was:
about an hour ago · Like · 5 people

Latoya Peterson ‎”But can you appropriate a term like nigger if your body is not defined/terrorized/policed/brutalized/diminished by the word? Can we use it in a context that is supposed to belie gender solidarity, without explicitly being in racial solidarity?” There are a few different ways in which we could play these critiques, but I find it fascinating that black women are not marching under that banner. And it isn’t because we’ve never heard the John Lennon perform the song.
about an hour ago · Like · 5 people

Aura Bogado Robert: No, no, no. Don’t get it twisted and try and act like I did something wrong here. If I parade a ridiculously racist sign and someone calls me out on it, it doesn’t all of the sudden become their fault for doing so. Nice try derailing the conversation and such, but it won’t work here. SlutWalk as the organization bears the responsibility as an institution for attracting this kind of shit, and Erin Clark, Kelly Peterlinz and whoever else proudly waved that sign bear responsibility as individuals.
47 minutes ago · Like · 1 person

Robert Busillo I’m not saying you DID anything wrong. I’m really just confused as to what you WANT. Just because you’re mad that something upset you, and lots of other people, doesn’t mean that they have any obligation to apologize. They’re sorry for offending you, yes. They shouldn’t have to be sorry for their message. You don’t know what it’s like to be a white girl. They don’t know what it’s like to be a non-white.

You should still be able to understand each other.
38 minutes ago · Like · 1 person

Kassidy Go Forth Clark First of all, i invite all those who are viewing this poster/photograph to actually ponder the INTENT of the quote.
lets try that out first before we jump to conclusions, and then see if we’re still feeling personally offended to a political statement that was to draw attention towards the treatment of black “niggers” in the 1800s and the treatment of women all over the world today.

if you are getting offended by this poster then it is your choice to get offended because the intention was not at all to call out blacks or whatever conclusion people have come up with.

the intention was a PROfeminist point that women all over the world are seen, treated, and thought as the “nigger” ; the equivalent of what “nigger” has meant strictly for black people during their reign of slavery, john lennon extended to the treatment of women so as to invoke extreme and serious inspection to the way we do treat the females of this society.

John Lennon was backed by Congressman Ron Dellums who stated, “If you define ‘nigger’ as someone whose lifestyle is defined by others, whose opportunities are defined by others, whose role in society is defined by others, the good news is that you don’t have to be black to be a nigger in this society. Most of the people in America are niggers.”

if this was a call out against blacks, i would be all with you taking those “white supremacists” down.
but it’s not.
i implore you to pay attention to the meaning of words and phrases before attacking someone who was not making an offense.
34 minutes ago · Like · 1 person

Tracey Salisbury What kills me is that white folks still have NOT moved one inch past telling women of color how to feel or think about anything and everything. Even worse, we are still explaining that we are both BLACK and WOMEN, all day, everyday….There is something just plain sad about feminism and feminist movements that can’t get this basic concept. Regardless of the “intent” or what white folks “think” the sign was supposed to mean, black women in significant numbers are offended, deeply. To make light of those feelings, to keep trying to avoid responsibility for the screw-up, makes the ability to have any kind of positive dialogue about what went wrong impossible.
31 minutes ago · Unlike · 5 people

Aura Bogado Kassidy, stop adding insult to injury, and stop derailing the conversation….

*You’re Interrogating From The Wrong Perspective*

“This is a very special tactic but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be freely or liberally used. If anything, it means you should use it as often and as widely as you can.

You see, in this one you get to insult their intelligence and perceptiveness but in a very subtle and underhanded way! This one is very useful in discussions about literature and other media or academia.

The gist of it is this: there’s nothing offensive in there, you just don’t get it (because you are too stupid)!

For example – you might want to impress your belief that context is irrelevant (there’s no racist parallels in a mythological planet where beautiful white elves keep horrible, animalistic orcs as slaves – it’s completely detached from earth’s history!), or that they’re just reading it wrong (well sure, you could take that attitude if you approach it from that perspective, but that’s not the perspective it was meant to be read with so your argument is just flawed!).

Once again (and truly a fundamental aspect of derailing) you demonstrate your lack of awareness of their issues but you also get to tell them that they’re wrong because you (and all the other Privileged People®) simply know better. Try it out and just wait and see what you get back.

Burn, baby, burn!”

See: http://www.derailingfordummies.com/#wrong
29 minutes ago · Unlike · 3 people

Latoya Peterson Kassidy: You are ignoring what people have already said as to why that was not okay, and quoting black men when black women (black FEMINISTS) have historically objected to the song and who are now, coming out against this term and use. Do we really have to break it down farther? No, everyone is not a nigger, and if you were ever treated like one, you would know. Appropriating a term that never has and never will apply to you is not what you are trying to accomplish,
28 minutes ago · Like · 3 people

Robert Busillo For some people, intention, facts, and reality don’t matter when you use the “n” word. Because sticks and stones can break our bones, and if anyone ever uses the “n” word in any context they’re a racist bastard.
28 minutes ago · Like

Bones Patterson kassidy- this is on another level, for real. i invite you to PONDER this article, for starters, http://www.racialicious.com/2011/10/05/which-women-are-what-now-slutwalk-nyc-and-failures-in-solidarity/ Latoya Peterson, of racialicious.com already tried to relay some of this information to you. maybe you didn’t read it? maybe you did and decided that what you had to say was more important. i can’t be sure.
28 minutes ago · Unlike · 3 people

Tracey Salisbury ‎@Robert – How many FAGGOT signs were at the event? How many GOD DAMN signs were at the event? How many FUCK YOU ROBERT signs were at the event? How many white women were skipping down the street with a racial slur on a sign at the event? AT LEAST ONE (one too many), the one sign that SUCCESSFULLY singled out black women and made they feel not apart, it doesn’t matter if the sign was up for 30 seconds or 30 minutes or 30 days. It’s easy to call someone “hypersensitive” when it’s not you be sullied….
26 minutes ago · Unlike · 2 people

Latoya Peterson If Slutwalk is about the ways in which sexual violence is visited upon female bodies, why are you all so bent on defending a statement that has nothing to do with that? Why do you keep ignoring the voices of women who object to this framing if this is a movement by and about women? The term nigger has been used against Arab Americans, South Asians, as well as African Americans – but it has never been used against white women! You know what has? The term “nigger lover” which was hurled at white women (one of whom was murders) participating in the civil rights movement. White women also used the term nigger against black men and women in similar struggles. Look at the suffragettes. “Woman” is not the nigger of the world. You can make the point that women are treated as second class citizens in almost every society without veering into blatant untruths.
23 minutes ago · Like · 5 people

Robert Busillo OK, you caught us. We’re racists and we hate you. Is that what you really think? Not everything is so black and white (……)
21 minutes ago · Like

Nicole Kubon Kassidy, I understand what you are TRYING to say but the reality is that a white woman, a white person, can never know what it is like or has been like, throughout history, to have this word used against you, used against you while experiences all sorts of oppression, including MASSIVE violence. We, as white feminists, do need to sit with the discomfort that comes along with unintentionally using hurtful language. While the intention may not have been malicious, what this sign said to many people of color attending SlutWalk NYC is that it was not a safe space where the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and other identities are important. This is why the sign and attempts to defend this sign are so upsetting to so many people, including SlutWalk organizers like myself. During the organizing process of SlutWalk NYC we wanted to pay special attention to the critiques SlutWalk had been receiving and to make a special effort to create this safe and inclusive space that others were lacking. We can’t police everyone at a huge event but it is definitely disappointing to me that others in attendance and we as organizers did not see and react to this sooner.
21 minutes ago · Unlike · 2 people

Nicole Kubon This is important stuff! We need to be able to call each other out and to engage in a discussion when we hurt one another, especially in an atmosphere where most everyone cares about these social issues. The fact is that often times white privilege is invisible to those who are white and it is not a one-time self-investigation where you read Peggy McIntosh and then abandon all of your unearned privilege. It is an ongoing process and it is important that we as activists be able to accept responsibility when we realize in retrospect that our lens is limited. We need to teach one another and be willing to learn from one another. I’m sad that this sign was used at the rally but I’m not sad that it has created an extremely important discussion with some well-intentioned young feminists who will hopefully keep learning from their experiences in activism, I know I have continued to grow and learn from my feminism and my unearned privilege and how they inform one another.
15 minutes ago · Like · 1 person

Tracey Salisbury ‎@Robert – spare me…if you can’t be an adult, don’t comment. No one called you a racist and no one said anything about hate. If you want to reject the real feelings and thoughts of people in a discussion, but lecture them at the same time, you be more thoughtful instead of flippant when you comment….
11 minutes ago · Unlike · 2 people

Bones Patterson the key, for me, as a white woman is constantly investigating my privilege and taking inventory. it’s huge. and i worry about the possibility that an investigation/ inventory might not be made. (i hope there will be one. and i hope there is growth.)
10 minutes ago · Like · 1 person

Kassidy Go Forth Clark ‎@everyone – you know whats ironic? is that we’re being accused of being racist because we’re defending the intention and meaning of a non-racist quote and yet you are the ones assuming i’m priveleged because i’m white. nice.

i don’t understand the meaning of the word nigger because it wasn’t directed at me? … nigger wasn’t directed at you either – it was used before your time. so we can play this game all day if we want.

white people have not moved one inch huh?
speaking about being adults why don’t we not use ridiculous over exaggerations and painful examples of being racist in your own way.

you are all jumping to side and rally against the black version of “nigger”
we are simply rallying against the human version of “nigger”

-peace, love, equality, RACISM ENDS WITH YOU
14 minutes ago · Like · 1 person

(See, this is why racism isn’t over. SMDH.)

Jaymee Martin oh. my. god. you have got to stop!
9 minutes ago · Like

Nicole Kubon Kassidy, its disappointing to hear you being so defensive. You DO NOT know what it is like to live without white privilege. I am not speaking to any other forms of privilege or oppression you have or do experience but if you hope to be an activist you need to be able to listen to others voices, and humble yourself. There is more to life than the Beatles, and while I think much of there music was progressive and influential, this is a word that white people do not get to reclaim, not for themselves (not sure how that would be possible) and not for humanity in general. The Beatles are a pop band made up of white men, let’s not say they are any sort of authority on feminist or racial issues.
3 minutes ago · Like

And fin.

Just… no.

Again, we have published tons about Slutwalk and what it means for women of color:

Slutwalk – To March or Not to March (Vancouver Slutwalk, Indigenous women, violence against women)
SlutWalks v. Ho Strolls (US Slutwalks, critical race critique, black women’s issues, the Stop Street Harassment Movement)
I Haven’t Actually Been Called a Slut (Malaysia, Western Slutwalks, “sexy as a slur”)

And there’s this “Open Letter from Black Women to Slutwalk” from BlackWomen’s Blueprint that encapsulates a lot of the concerns.

And that’s just the beginning. See, Slutwalk is one of the many long, long conversations about relationships between feminism, racism, class, nation-states, colonization, and power. We’ve got more than 70 posts on feminism and its discontents on our blog alone. And it’s a big, big internet with many others debating, writing, blogging.

So at this point, these aren’t accidents – it’s willful ignorance. One of the respondents says she’s fifteen – that she really didn’t think about all of those things. She’s still early in her walk, and people can change, if they chose to.

Unfortunately, as we see from the continuation on the thread, some people don’t want to understand why women of color would be angry at that phrase, and they don’t care why John Lennon isn’t the best representative on race issues. As Miles pointed out yesterday in the comments to the original post, some “white people just want to say the word nigger.”

And that they have.

The message – and the subtext – came through loud and clear. It just wasn’t the one they meant.

Now, I don’t mean to fuel any animosity between African Americans and Mexicans, whites and anyone else. God knows there are enough attacks against one another for superficial and ridiculous reasons (and attacking anyone for their so-called race or ethnicity is silly). What we often forget is that idiots come in all colors–if I have any prejudice it’s against people who don’t know what they’re talking about, who don’t know their own history, let alone that of others.

So instead of going off myself, I’m going to make this a “teaching moment” (I know, this is dumb cliché, but you get the point). Why react in kind to Mr. Williams in an already negative environment; this issue is bigger than one bad night at the comedy club (a small message to Mr. Williams: There is always going to be bad nights at the club, get over it).

Mexicans did fight for California. In fact, the one major battle they had with Anglo forces invading California they won, with horses and lances, just outside of Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the decision to turn the state over to the United States was made in Washington D.C. without the input of the people involved.

In fact, there was a whole war that Mexicans fought to stop the illegal invasion, which, lest Mr. Williams forget, was being pushed by the slave-owning interests in the United States. It was Southern slaveholders who ignited the war to rip Texas away from Mexico when Anglos refused to accept Mexico’s laws against slavery.

Mexico had abolished slavery in the early 1800s, way before the Emancipation Proclamation; Mexico even had at least two African-Mexicans as presidents some two hundreds years before Barack Obama was elected president in this country.

The main catalyst for the Mexican war was the refusal of Mexico to return black slaves–believed to be more than 10,000–who had taken the southern-route of the “underground railroad,” crossing the border to a free Mexico. In Mexico’s governing assembly heavy debates on the issue ended up with the majority supporting these slaves, allowing them to own land, to farm, to become part of the Mexican social fabric.

Mexicans were willing to die so blacks could be free.

–Luis J. Rodriguez, “Why We Need a Deeper Dialogue on Black-and-Brown Relations”

Image credit: VOYAJ

On Saturday evening 6th of August I was gathered with friends in Peckham, South London celebrating the opportunities and doors open to us. One friend travelling to China for a year, my scholarship for a masters degree, another friend rising in influence in the community. All of us young Black people having grown up in the inner city on Estates and council properties. Graduates with narratives that disturb the monolithic perspective of Black youth identity. But not disconnected from our own context and committed to our community it was with grief, sympathy and solidarity that we turned toward Tottenham, by then, ablaze with anger and burning out brick and mortar. This morning – through the soot and smoke filter – the socio-economic barriers remained.

Numerous stories have emerged but there is no verified account of what turned a peaceful protest into a riot that would endanger lives and ruin local businesses and services. Earlier that afternoon members of the community in Tottenham gathered to demand answers from the metropolitan police, who on Thursday 4th August stopped 29 year old Mark Duggan in a Mini Cab and engaged in a shoot out that resulted in his death. Duggan, father of four, had allegedly been in possession of firearms. This is another of at least three accounts of Black men’s deaths during police operations this year alone. It has only been five months since over a thousand people gathered to protest the suspicious death of Smiley Culture whilst the police were at his home.

Last night’s riots in Tottenham come exactly twenty-five years after the infamous Broadwater Farm riots in the same part of London. Not vastly dissimilar from recent events, Cynthia Jarret died whilst the police conducted a search of her home. Just the week before that Dorothy Groce was shot by police instigating the 1985 Brixton Uprisings. When community members gathered at the police station tensions rose and the peaceful protest in Tottenham erupted into riot. The violence escalated and policeman Keith Blakelock was killed. (The intricacies of this case are harrowing and worth reading).

A quarter of a century on we are asking if police-community relations in Tottenham are any better. That is only for the residents of that area to say but it is evident that they are still not good enough when police accounts are understandably met with such distrust. As we face-off with the returned ugliness of the 80s British conservatism and increasing hostility, conditions are being set for a ‘police army state’. I was disgusted listening to a BBC Radio 5 reporter commenting ‘If you shoot at the police what else do you expect?’ I expect the police to arrest and charge their suspects. I expect individuals charged with crimes to face court and the full length of our judicial process as required. (The Guardian has since published information stating early ballistic tests show that all bullets were fired from the police – evidence of the false account used to cover police corruption.) I have not been so deceived out of my citizenship, nor convinced of the absent humanity of those of us living in the inner city, as to expect and humbly accept rising numbers of curious deaths at the hands of our police – and certainly not when they are all men of African-Caribbean descent. As Reverend Nims passionately expressed standing in Tottenham speaking to BBC News this afternoon, the Duggan family waited for hours to get answers from the police to no avail. Their anger is legitimate and their right to justice persists.

My perspective here is more complex than ‘F@*k the police’. I understand fully that they have a job to do and that many of them are simply executers of the racism that is systemically part of the police force as an institution. It is this foundation that makes me object to Trident (who conducted Thursdays operation) despite the commentary of many explaining the danger of government plans to disband the department as part of budget cuts. Activist Lee Jasper in particular shared very thorough thoughts on his issue here. I however believe that Trident has lead to the increased criminalisation of African-Caribbean people in the eyes of this nation. Consistently reported and advertised as a department developed to tackle gun crime in the Black community our joint citizenship is undermined and we are ostracised as ‘the problem immigrants’. We are specially policed like animals. These may seem like trivial concerns when held against the real and potential work Trident do in reducing violent crime. But the above perceptions fuel racism. There is no clearer denial of our humanity by the government and larger British public than the fact that they are/were willing to invest money into specifically policing Black communities, but resist and resent at every turn investing in our education, employment, specific healthcare needs etc through policy, grants, or initiatives like affirmative action that redistribute power and create fairer playing grounds. The strategy has been to tackle crime without addressing the different types of social exclusion that create the conditions for it, and the injustice of social exclusion is on the rise in areas like Tottenham. This may be why there were many eye witness accounts, and Social Activist and Youth Campaigner Symeon Brown who had been there the whole night went on record with the BBC to express that the police had only secured the banks and police station, and observed while the rest of Tottenham burnt down.

Duggan’s death was not the cause of the rioting but a trigger that set light to legitimate anger in that community. Haringey Council implemented a 75% budget cut to youth services closing down many of the centres and resources most needed by young people especially during the holiday period. With Conservative policies creating higher unemployment, threatening our national health service and stripping our arts sector it is the people in these inner city areas that suffer most.

It is senseless and disconnected preamble to discuss the rioting as rational or strategic. It was impetuous, emotional and in some cases exploitative. But lasts nights violence stands to reason and if the history of the last 25 years is not evidence enough then Frantz Fanon one of the most important thinkers on Black experience describes it for us clearly:

At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect. [Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, 1963. New York Press, p93]

The rioting is tragic and regrettable and devastating. Many people in the Tottenham area woke up to the loss & destruction of their businesses and property. That always presents horror but particularly so in this economic climate. Four children have woken up this morning to confront the loss of their father. That is stifling. These are the personal stories. The macro narrative is that time is not linear but circular. There is no more appropriate scripture this Sunday evening than Solomon’s words ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9) The conditions were set, the violence followed, no different to what generations before us have known. So much so that it brought together the whole spectrum of multiculturalism in that area. Tottenham was destroyed last night. It is time to rebuild: “A call for engagement, empowerment, education and economic revival” says political activist Rukayah Sarumi.

Let the work begin today.

There have been thousands of words written about Stockett’s skills, her portrayal of the black women versus the white women, her right to tell this story at all. I won’t rehash those arguments, except to say that I found the novel fast-paced but highly problematic. Even more troubling, though, is how the structure of narratives like The Help underscores the failure of pop culture to acknowledge a central truth: Within the civil rights movement, white people were the help.

The architects, visionaries, prime movers, and most of the on-the-ground laborers of the civil rights movement were African-American. Many white Americans stood beside them, and some even died beside them, but it was not their fight — and more important, it was not their idea.

This isn’t the first time the civil rights movement has been framed this way fictionally, especially on film. Most Hollywood civil rights movies feature white characters in central, sometimes nearly solo, roles. My favorite (not!) is Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning, which gives us two white FBI agents as heroes of the movement. FBI agents! Given that J. Edgar Hoover did everything short of shoot Martin Luther King Jr. himself in order to damage or discredit the movement, that goes from troubling to appalling.

Why is it ever thus? Suffice it to say that these stories are more likely to get the green light and to have more popular appeal (and often acclaim) if they have white characters up front. That’s a shame. The continued impulse to reduce the black women and men of the civil rights movement to bit players in the most extraordinary step toward justice that this nation has ever known is infuriating, to say the least. Minny and Aibileen are heroines, but they didn’t need Skeeter to guide them to the light. They fought their way out of the darkness on their own — and they brought the nation with them.

–Martha Southgate, The Truth about the Civil Rights Era

By Guest Contributor Jabari Sellars

Superhero movies routinely take liberties with established storylines and characters, with famously mixed results. But even with all the disappointment recent efforts brought to theatres, this summer offers one final comic-book adaptation with the potential to cleanse the palette.

Marvel Studios’ Captain America: The First Avenger hits theatres on July 22nd in hopes of joining Iron Man and The Dark Knight as financially successful comic book adaptations that earn the acclaim of critics and fans alike, bridging the gap between generations of comic-book lore and bringing characters and messages powerful enough to interest audiences beyond Cap’s customary fanbase. It would seem impossible for First Avenger to satisfy everyone, but one way the film could earn some goodwill from both fandom and mainstream audiences would be to introduce the man who was Captain America before Steve Rogers, Isaiah Bradley.

As shown in Robert Morales and Kyle Baker’s 2003 series Truth: Red, White & Black, Bradley actually preceded Rogers in surviving test doses of the Super Soldier Serum procedure. In the story, based on the tragic accounts of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments of 1932, Bradley was the only one of a group of misled African-American soldiers during early World War II to do so; his comrades suffered from issues of rage, depression and suicide, or were killed in action.

While the perfected serum was then given to blonde-haired, blue-eyed Steve Rogers, who was then promoted as a symbol of American military exceptionalism, Bradley was court-martialed after going on a mission against the command of his superiors while wearing a Captain America uniform. Bradley was subsequently imprisoned and tortured during the 1960s, and left a shell of his once energetic and talkative self.

Isaiah’s legacy of heroism would survive into the modern Marvel Comics universe. His son, Josiah X, wore the stars and stripes as a member of The Crew, a team led by War Machine. And Isaiah’s grandson, Elijah Bradley, has emerged as perhaps the best-known hero in the family, thanks to his exploits as Patriot, in the various Young Avengers series. Elijah has also been very vocal about the treatment his grandfather received from the government – even reminding Steve Rogers himself of the debt he owes Isaiah:

Including Isaiah in First Avenger – even as an “easter egg”-type mention – would fit in with Marvel Studios’ approach of using some story ideas and character depictions from the more modernized, more diverse Ultimate Marvel Universe; depicting Nick Fury as an African American male and Thor as a mental case with illusions of grandeur are plot devices taken directly from the works of Mark Millar and Brian Michael Bendis.

But even with that source material, there’s still a significantly small number of heroes of color found in the movies. Acknowledging Isaiah adds authentic diversity to a film that, aside from Derek Luke’s small part as Howling Commando Gabriel Jones and Samuel L. Jackson’s inevitable after-credit cameo, is completely white – a setting that ignores the sacrifices of thousands of Black and Hispanic U.S. soldiers during the real World War II, and the discrimination they still had to fight after returning home.

Other recent Marvel-based movies have handled diversity inconsistently: in Thor, Heimdall’s race was changed, while X-Men: First Class embraced the title of socially conscious historical fiction without discussing the most important aspects of the 1960s. First Avenger wouldn’t have to resort to any revisions – one black man’s sacrifice is already part of the Captain America mythos, and that should be respected.

I’m back, America.

I have been home, on U.S. soil, for the past 3 weeks, and it has given me some time to reflect on being a black woman in U.S. vs. being a black American woman in France. Living in France for the second time was rather colder than the first but a bit more illuminating in terms of race. That can be attributed to the fact that while Aix-en-Provence, the first city that introduced me to the entrancing world of French culture, is an international student-city in the sunny south, Vannes is situated in Bretagne, in the rainy north-west of the country. Aside from the nonstop rain, Vannes was whiter than white. Not to say I didn’t see black people – indeed, I noticed black women on my daily bus route to work, but many public spaces, like the port, the library, and the grocery store were lacking in color. Admittedly, there were actually two black hair stores and a café Afrique that shut down while I was there, but that was about it.

Binta, the young Senegalese woman who did my hair, broke it down for me one day, “There’s no black people here because it’s too small because there are no jobs. But a lot of them marry French.” By “French”, she meant white men, and her sister, the owner of Ebene Cosmetique, was one such example. I noticed, with a certain amount of chagrin, that many Europeans of color refer to their privileged compatriots as the standard of that country, while they are specifically marked by their race. “English” are white, but English blacks are, well, black. The same goes for conversations I have had with German blacks. I suppose we hold the same standard in America, but because of our sordid misdealings with the social construction, although blacks may not be considered true “Americans” we do not refer to our white counterparts as simply “Americans”. Indeed, we are obsessed with race but rarely given the proper tools to talk about, much less acknowledge, our race problems. And white Europeans know it, effectively allowing them to ignore their own issues, I discovered.

When I first arrived in Vannes, I befriended a couple of local boys, and we often went out to bars since there is little else to do in the city. Amazed at the utter whiteness of the venue, one night I asked my friend, “Do you ever notice that there are essentially no black people here – why is that?” and he said, “There are some, just not many. But it’s very different in France, we are much less conscience of race in France than Americans.” He smoothly side-stepped my question and turned the focus to America’s racism. Because America is a popular topic in the media, the nightly French news frequently reported breaking American news. Thus, the world beyond our borders is informed of how race issues are part and parcel to American culture.

While visiting Budapest, Hungary, a completely inter-ethnic group of us twenty-somethings went to smoke hookah – an American, two Portuguese, an Indian, and a Hungarian native to be exact. The inevitable subject of Barack Obama was broached and the U.S.’s fixation on race quickly followed. I mentioned how racist America truly is in its practices – on institutional and structural levels, as well as individual, and Pedro said, “Well of course this is because of your history with slavery, but it is absurd because America is a nation of immigrants.” Once again, we were able to discuss America’s hot-button issue, illegal immigration, without a mention of colorism in India or the Neo-Nazi march in Hungary last year.

Although I am the first to extol Europe’s interracial dating practices, it is no less difficult to have real discussions about xenophobia, racism, or Islamophobia as it is here in the U.S. And Europeans seem to have the ultimate trump card: America is the first and the worst of them all.

During a brief visit to Bordeaux, a beauteous, sparkling gem in the south of France, I paid a visit to the Museum d’histoire naturelle, The Natural History of Museum. I was pleasantly surprised to see there was an extensive exhibition of Bordeaux’s slave history. To my dismay, French historians downplay and minimize slavery parallel to American history. I have been to many history museums in the U.S., but none to my memory have put such a heavy emphasis on tribes selling their own into slavery.

Transcript:

Like many other civilizations, African societies practiced slavery. European demand boosted this practice and, from Senegal to Angola as well as in East Africa, African rulers and dealers made substantial profits from the slave trade. Most of those who were enslaved were captured in battles or were kidnapped. Some were the children of slaves, or were sold by their parents during times of famine. As demand in Europe increased, the African dealers carried out raids further into the interior and many of the captives died before reaching the coast. In time the slave trade moved to new areas and after 1780, the dealers from Bordeaux started buying slaves in Mozambique and Zanzibar. The slave shops spent 3 to 6 months traveling to different parts of the coast buying their cargo. Mortality rates were highest amongst those who were embarked at the start of the voyage.

Slavery has been practiced by all civilizations down the ages [first written record in Mesopotamia]. Often, as in ancient Rome, ‘slave’ was a synonym for ‘foreigner’, since most societies were repelled by the idea of enslaving people who belonged to their culture. Slavery was therefore sustained by wars and since captives had to be displaced or transported, the slave trade was developed. The African and Arab slave trades pre-date the arrival of Europeans. However, the European demand for the slave labour to exploit the resources of the New World saw this trade in human beings rise to the unprecedented levels over a short period. In the New World, slaves were considered to be property, no more than a raw work force.

Although it was probably futile, I attempted to re-read these descriptions from the perspective of someone who was unaware of slavery in Europe. These re-made versions of history would have us believe that slavery happened because it has been happening and Africans wanted to make money from it. Europeans merely wanted to take advantage of what was already going on. To my chagrin, beyond in-depth diagrams of slave ships and maps of the trans-Atlantic, there was no mention of the extant racism embedded in French culture. Like the new ban on veils, which reeks of Islamophobia but is also the status quo for Nicolas Sarkozy and his administration.

While I did receive a few stares, and the same questions about ethnicity over and over again, I never had overt experiences with racism: being followed around stores, out of pocket remarks or foreign hands touching my hair. As before, I strongly encourage all people of color to travel or live abroad, if it is feasible. Just know that the racial ‘baggage’ you take with you will be greeted with a brand-new, dare I say it, exotic version: racism exists abroad, you know, just not as bad as it is in America.

This book will not just quietly die.

We first were notified about Kathryn Stockett’s The Help back in 2010. A few readers asked us if we had read it. If we had heard the NPR interview. One blogger, Onyx M, started a critique blog. We’ve been silent for a while on the book world – outside of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, we haven’t reviewed a book in a long time. Probably because the stack of books that people have sent in still teeters on my desk. And all of the books are good, so they deserve a thorough discussion. But stealing time away to read a book, analyze it, and write about it doesn’t come easy.

And that process is even harder when one enters a book with as much trepidation as I enter The Help. Now that ads for the movie adaptation are all over TV, it’s time to go ahead and put this to rights. I have a new book review format that may help with timeliness. Now, if I can only get over my reluctance.

Even skimming the reviews makes me want to throw up in my mouth a little bit.

The Huffington Post checks out the controversy, noting:

Writing for Ms. Magazine, Erin Aubry Kaplan wonders, “Why must blacks speak dialect to be authentic? Why are Stockett’s white characters free of the linguistic quirks that white Southerners certainly have?” The Christian Science Monitor notes the same problem, wondering about the “decision to convey only black voices in dialect, with nary a dropped ‘g’ among her generally less sympathetic Southern white characters.”

Still, the Monitor and others generally seem to find that the novel rises above these flaws, and others don’t see them as flaws at all. In The Washington Post, Sybil Steinberg finds that one of “Stockett’s accomplishments is reproducing African American vernacular and racy humor without resorting to stilted dialogue.”

Why do I get the feeling that Steinberg’s idea of African American vernacular and a linguist’s opinion on the matter would be two entirely different things?

Over at White Readers Meet Black Authors, Trisha R. Thomas puts up a review of The Help noting:

It’s true that readers are a narcissistic bunch. We find the characters who most resemble us and our thoughts to agree with, cheer for, and feel for in their deepest pain. We celebrate their victories as our own. The Help tells an honest story of women taking a chance and stepping out of old beliefs. You can’t help but love a story when the ones you care about win in the end. Caring whether or not the author is black or white seems of no substance now. Would a black author have experienced living with a maid all her life and know the life of Skeeter, Abilene, or Minny? I don’t know about you, but my only care giver was my mother and the public school system. I’m black, an author, and could not have written The Help. We are who we are. This novel struck the nerves of both black and white readers. It especially hit mine remembering my first novel and being judged as not “black enough” What did I know about nappy? How dare I write on the subject at all? I soldiered on, ignoring the critics. I wrote what I knew to be true from my experiences. We write what we know. If we’re lucky, we do it well. Judging a book by it’s color has to end somewhere. We have to be the change we want to see in others. Open minds mean open pages. The door needs to stay unlocked for all of us. Freedom to write whatever we want. Freedom to read whatever, whomever we want.

Thomas brings up a good point – of empathy and honest storytelling. One does not need to have the same experience as a character to be able to identify with them. There are many books I love, stories of people I am not. I loved Oscar Wao, though I am not Dominican-American or from Jersey. It spoke to me anyway. I loved Free Food for Millionaires, though I am not Korean-American, nor did I go to college, nor do I work in finance. Spoke to me anyway.

But there is a difference, I think, between allowing yourself to embrace lives and experiences not ones own and being forced through what is essentially literary waterboarding. Thomas mentions the Secret Life of Bees as a book she enjoyed – I didn’t make it all the way through the book. There was something about being repeatedly plunged into the character of Lily, but being kept arm’s length from August, June, and May was aggravating for me. This didn’t happen when I re-read To Kill a Mockingbird – but perhaps it is because Scout’s world started white and stayed white. She merely observed what was happening most of the book, and did not act as an agent, until far later. In some ways, I found that less condescending. Mockingbird is still problematic, but in some ways, for the same reason I enjoyed it – it used scenes to describe what was happening to the black characters, instead of trying to recreate their voices in an extended, intimate narrative. I remember that my thoughts kept straying while reading the Secret Life of Bees – how Lily’s actions were dangerous, why she was so reckless when the lives of others could be on the line, what was going on in the minds of the other women? I kept drifting away from the character, my own experiences, past readings, and thoughts keeping me from sinking into her. So in that way, Lily’s narrative was like a straight-jacket I couldn’t escape from.

I think that’s my hesitancy about The Help. I have read stories where white authors can convincingly craft characters of color. When they do it well, I forget who is writing. But I generally that is not the case. I used to hate reading Patricia Cornwell writing black characters in her narrative. They were generally jerky side characters, and did things that were inexplicable to me, like “unraveling [their] long dreadlocks.” After I read that line, I spent hours trying to figure out what the hell she was trying to say. Did she mean braids? Unraveling was a weird word. Did she even know the difference between dreads, braids, and twists? It’s these little jarring moments that remind me that a writer is creating a world, and that world may not actually include me. James Patterson is better with Alex Cross. His portrayals were a bit lopsided at times – I remember the whole “blood and bones of my ancestors” speech in one of the early Cross novels that had me also perplexed. The way many white writers discuss and interpret racism is just straight up different – and it’s rarely ever subtle. Whereas reading Benilde Little’s Good Hair, the protagonist is trying to confront her white boss about favoring less seasoned white reporters over her without setting off the angry black woman alarm. Needless to say, she presses her boss, but race doesn’t come up in the actual conversation. Too risky. Just like in real life. Your boss may be racist, but you are the one dealing with the consequences.

This isn’t to say The Help does any of this – I can’t judge a book I haven’t read, full stop.

But I am not really looking forward to the experience. I hope I’m wrong, and we’ve come to a point in America where a white woman can write in a real authentic way about race, and other white women will love it, not because it’s been “properly translated” but because it allows them to access their thoughts and memories of a time in the not-too-distant past. Maybe this is a way of healing. To admit that things were fucked up and white women did their share in perpetuating that while still being oppressed by white men, and as we acknowledge this part of our pasts, we can start shaping our present and correcting for the future.

Then I read “Ten Issues that Tarnish the Help” (complete with citations from the text) and realize that I’m going to need a big bottle of wine for this one.

By Arturo R. García

After being seen in Chicago, and Los Angeles, the anti-abortion push targeting women of color has spread to Atlanta and Oakland.

The latest campaign, headed by The Radiance Foundation has “no political reason at all,” according to chief creative officer Ryan Bomberger. However, the new billboards – which say “The 13th Amendment freed us. Abortion enslaves us” – was timed to coincide with Juneteenth, which celebrates the emancipation of U.S. slaves Bomberger told The Huffington Post:

“When you look at what abortion has brought to the black community, it can’t be typified to anything other than present-day slavery. Roe v. Wade used the 14th Amendment–which finally gave humanity to African Americans—and contorted it to give someone the right to kill an unborn child. It’s just like slavery, because you have a class of people who are considered less than human, and therefore they can be treated like property.”

Another 60 billboards went up around Oakland saying “Black & Beautiful,” in a campaign run by the Issues For Life Foundation, an offshoot of the Radiance group. According to KGO-TV, Issues For Life held a press conference in Oakland Saturday accusing Planned Parenthood of racism:

“I had an appointment with death,” one woman said. “My mother’s name was in a book. There was an appointment time for me to have died, and if God hadn’t broken that appointment, I wouldn’t be here today.”

While Issues For Life told KTVU-TV the billboards, currently scheduled to be on display thru July 10, were intended to “create a dialogue,” district Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) has already voiced her opposition to them.

“They stigmatize African-American women, they’re not a positive message,” Lee told the station. “All women should have a right to make their own decisions without anyone interfering with those personal decisions.”

The director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau told the Post it had taken note of the Radiant campaign.

“Comparing abortion to slavery certainly raises major concerns,” said Hilary Shelton. “Women are not forced to have abortions the way they were in servitude. Slavery was about not having the right to make any decisions. Women were actually bred to produce children for the purposes of profit. This is so far removed from that, that if it weren’t such a serious issue, it would almost be laughable.”

“First Class” is set in 1962. That was the year South Carolina marked the Civil War centennial by returning the Confederate Flag to the State Capitol; the year the University of Mississippi greeted its first black student, James Meredith, with a lethal race riot; the year George Wallace was elected governor of Alabama.

That was the year a small crowd of Americans gathered at the Lincoln Memorial and commemorated the 100th birthday of the Emancipation Proclamation. Only a single African-American was asked to speak (Thurgood Marshall, added under threat of boycott). In “First Class,” 1962 finds our twin protagonists, Magneto and Professor X, also rallying before the Lincoln Memorial, not for protest or commemoration, but for a game of chess. “First Class” is not blind to societal evils, so much as it works to hold evil at an ocean’s length. The film is rooted in its opposition to the comfortably foreign abomination of Nazism.

This is all about knowing your audience.

I am reminded of the House Republicans, opening the 112th Congress by reciting the Constitution, minus the slavery parts. I am reminded of the English professor last year who, responding to Huckleberry Finn’s widespread banishment from public schools, was compelled to offer the Mark Twain classic, minus the nigger parts. I think of the Pentagon official, who this year justified the war in Afghanistan to soldiers by invoking the words of Dr. King, minus the “ultimate weakness of violence” parts. I am reminded of whole swaths of this country where historical fiction compels Americans to claim the Civil War was about states’ rights, minus the “right to own people” part.

This is all about a convenient suspension of disbelief.

- From The New York Times, June 8

By Guest Contributor Ay-leen The Peacemaker, cross-posted from Beyond Victoriana

In California at the turn of the 20th century, a community grew in southern California with an interesting history: Punjabi-Mexican families of the Imperial Valley. This unique community stemmed from the effects of British colonialism, transnational labor immigration & American economic opportunity (and American anti-Asian discrimination laws). Many multi-generational families in the area today can trace their multicultural and multiethnic histories back over a hundred years, and refer to themselves as “Mexican Hindus”, “Hindu” or “East Indian” today.

During the 19th century, many Punjabi families sent their sons abroad to earn a living outside the British Raj; most of these sons had served as part of the British army and police force in China. Eventually, these men saved enough for passage to America to work in manufacturing, lumber, or agriculture, with a majority of this immigration happening between 1900 and 1917. These bands of travelling workers were known in America as “Hindu crews.” Others from the middle to upper-middle classes sough educational opportunities in American universities. These Punjabi immigrants typically entered America through Angel Island, the entry point for overseas immigration on the US West Coast. According to Professor Karen Leonard, “Some 85 percent of the men who came during those years were Sikhs, 13 percent were Muslims, and only 2 percent were really Hindus.”

At the time of immigration, these men hoped to bring over their families once they’ve settled in America. But because of changes in American immigration laws, they were unable to send for their families. Many Punjabi immigrants, however, soon formed their own communities with the other ethnic group that shared the farming work with them: Mexican laborers. In 1910, refugees fled the violence of the Mexican Revolution and sought out a new life across the border.

Despite cultural and religious differences, both groups shared similar working lives and their communities became integrated with each other. Additionally in California, miscegenation laws preventing racial intermarriage existed until 1948, but that applied to only white and non-white unions; thus marriage between other non-white groups wasn’t prevented.

Many of these marriages were arranged by Mexican families to Punjabi bachelors; the brides were mostly considerably younger than their husbands. Not only were there marriages out of love, but Punjabi men were seen as more financially stable, since by the time of Mexican immigration, most Punjabi men have become successful businessmen. Mexican-American women were allowed to own land, while Punjabi men were denied US citizenship and could not, and a compromise was constructed that allowed Punjabi-Mexican families to own land for themselves. Women who married lost their land rights, but legal loopholes were worked out with white landowners who would hold their property in trust until American children were born and the land agreements could be placed under their names.

Unlike expectations of assimilation, Mexican-Punjabi families had difficulty being accepted by Mexican-Americans and formed a distinct community of their own. Because of different religions, these marriages were civil unions, and most wives kept their Catholic heritage and passed it onto their children. Spanish was predominantly spoken in the home and most Punjabi men added Spanish nicknames. They passed on little of their Punjabi heritage to their families with exception to funeral customs and food. Another aspect that impacted the evolution of Punjabi-Mexican culture is the fact that many Punjabi fathers were denied US citizenship and legal rights, despite being successful businessmen and firmly established in America. As a result, many Punjabi fathers chose not to pass on their cultural heritage on which they had been discriminated against:

The original Punjabi immigrants refused to transmit elements of Punjabi culture that they judged inappropriate in the United States, according to their children. Many fathers felt that the immigration laws and other discriminatory policies against Asians had made it useless to teach the children Punjabi, or even to tell them about Punjabi society. Social practices from the Punjab, life cycle ceremonies, and caste and religious distinctions and observances, were consciously discarded; when interviewed, several children remarked on their father’s refusal to talk to them about the Punjab, refusals justified by the uselessness of such knowledge and by the need to become American. (Source)

Nevertheless, many Punjabi-Mexican families found ways to express their background in ways that celebrate the hardship and determination of their immigrant ancestors, and this community still thrives in California today, especially as later generations have come to call themselves the “Sikh pioneers of North America.”

More information:

Punjabi-Mexican Americans on Wikipedia

Half and Halves: The Punjabi-Mexican-Americans of California

Roots in the Sand: a PBS documentary

Excerpt from California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans by Karen Leonard

More info on Karen Leonard’s book California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans

Photo courtesy of Steven Williamson

By Guest Contributor Gabriel Canada

The Indianapolis 500 is the largest single day sporting event in the world, held in a venue – the Indianapolis Motor Speedway – large enough to fit the Vatican and Churchill Downs at the same time. This unique facility is even more remarkable considering it was built in 1909 in an era before the World Cup or Super Bowl.

But though it can seat more than 400,000 people, the only diversity on the famed Speedway track was in the countries represented in the field. It would not be until 1991 that a black driver, Willy T. Ribbs, qualified for the world’s signature racing event.

For Ribbs, there was never any doubt that Indy is where he wanted to be. The fact that there had been no black driver to previously run in the race was never a factor for him.

“The historical side of my competing in the Indianapolis 500 had no relevance to me at the time,” Ribbs said. “My whole purpose in being in the Indianapolis 500 was, this is the greatest race in the world and that is where you want to be. As a young kid playing football you want to be in the Super Bowl as a young kid playing baseball its the world series and for a young kid growing up in racing I wanted to be in the Indianapolis 500. Its the greatest race in the world. That’s all that mattered to me.”

It’s important to point out that Ribbs was not racing’s first black star. That would be Charlie Wiggins, an accomplished driver in his own right, but made his name as the chief mechanic behind Wild Bill Cummings’ 1934 win at Indianapolis. Wiggins had been denied the option of competing in the race as a driver because of strict racial employment restrictions. Instead, he swept floors during the day and worked solely at night to convince officials his role at the track was that of the team janitor. He did so at considerable risk to himself. While working in a similar position at a race in Louisville spectators jumped into the pits in an attempt to lynch him.

While Ribbs didn’t face that level of threat in attempting to qualify, he was still, quite literally, risking his life: he spent the better part of a month in Indianapolis dealing with mechanical failures.

“We weren’t getting much track time,” Ribbs recalls. “Once we got a good engine in there and we got onto the Speedway to qualify for the final day. It was one of those moments when you look inside yourself and you’re going to see who you are now. When I drove out of that pit lane onto turn one to qualify I told myself it doesn’t matter now. Your life means nothing now. If your not in this race you’re going to want to die. This is your life now. The whole idea was to put everything on the line to get into this race.”

There was no pause for relief just a disconnect from reality when he finally made it into the starting line for the 500. Times taken during the process don’t reflect a driver’s fastest lap, so Ribbs had to go as fast as possible for four laps. He described the process as entering another world: “It’s like you’re traveling through a tunnel.”

The journey through that tunnel started at an early age for Ribbs. His father, he says, raced cars as a hobby. But by the time he was nine years old, young Willy was ready to make it a career, and his parents, he says, supported his dream.

“I had role models like Jim Clark, Mario Andretti, Dan Gurney, Bobby Unser,” he says. “I had drivers like that I focused on. Like any young kid I had those lights out there. It was my parents that got me racing. Sending me off to race in Europe and now I’m here.”

While every driver learns to work with sponsors during their career, Ribbs forged a unique relationship with someone not commonly associated with the racing world: comedian Bill Cosby, who is named on Ribbs’ website as “The Big Man.” Ribbs said the two first connected in the late 1980s.

“He knew who I was,” Ribbs says. “I had won a few races had success in a few series at this point when he called me up he said I don’t like racing but I like what your doing tell me which way we need to go. I told him I want to race at Indy and in the Indy Car Championship. He said meet me in two days in Vegas and teach me what we need to do. It was really that simple.”

Their arrangement was simple and precise: Ribbs dealt with Cosby directly, bypassing the usual lawyers or managers connected to one of the world’s best-known celebrities. For his part, Ribbs only had to a) tell Cosby how much sponsorship money he needed and b) use that sum wisely.

With two top 10 finishes his rookie year, on top of his historic arrival and Top 20 finish at Indy, Cosby’s money had been invested wisely. But, Ribbs says, he still faced an uphill battle: teams like Penske, Ganassi or Newman Haas, he says, had two-thirds more of a budget than his own. This disparity is at the heart of Ribbs’ only regret from his Indy Car years.

When asked where that reticence came from, despite his successes and history-making appearance, Ribbs is at a loss: “I have no answer for that,” he says. “Its something they would have to answer.”

Twenty years after that first tense qualifying run, and a second Indy appearance in 1993, Ribbs returned to the Speedway, but this time he’s in another role: as a team owner in the Indy Lights Series circuit, Ribbs is helping a new generation of drivers prepare to go through that same tunnel. He says that coming back to Indy as an owner was something he was thinking of the first time he made it to Indy.

“Once you retire from the sport a lot of drivers head out to pasture,” Ribbs says. “Well I wasn’t ready to start grazing yet. The new goal is to go to Indy. To be in the Indy Championship Series.”

Ribbs’ driver, Chase Austin, is making history in his own right: he was both the first biracial driver to make his start on a NASCAR Bush series race, and the first in the Indy Lights Series’ short history.

Ribbs has known Austin, a 21-year-old Kansas native, for the past five years, when Austin’s family approached the veteran for advice on their son’s driving career. Ribbs says the goal, at this point, is to lead Austin along “his first rodeo,” but not to pressure him – especially on this kind of track.

“Indy is difficult no matter what,” Ribbs says. “You could run a golf cart around here and it would still be difficult. It is the toughest racetrack in the world. There isn’t even a close or distant second. The fact of the matter is its very dangerous and this place has killed more race drivers than anywhere else on the planet. But the prestige is worth it. The event speaks for itself.”