Slapinions

Recently I suggested visiting a website called Stuff White People Like. I labeled it, properly I believe, as a comedy site, albeit one with a non-PC attitude that gently poked fun of Caucasians.

I guess I was riding the cutting edge of a fad, and a darn controversial one too, since this headline appears online at the Houston Chronicle today:

Race-related blog causing controversy
Caucasian site is flooded with hits

At the risk of sounding like a right-wing kook, what  horses**t.

It's not a blog, except in the sense that it's a website where the most current information is displayed on top of the page and older information below. It's not some guys running commentary on his life or his business or what interests him; it's scripted comedy.

'Race related'? 'Caucasian'"? By the dictionary definition, sure, but that headline is intentional race-baiting. The site is not derogatory towards any race (other than perhaps my own) and even then it's intended as comedy.

The older I get, the less the 1st amendment seems to matter in the face of political correctness.

It's a mild COMEDY site people!

To be fair, I blame the editor, the person who traditionally writes the headlines. The writer himself is pretty even-handed:

Dean Rader, a pop culture critic who authors weeklyrader.blogspot.com, says readers flock to Stuff White People Like because it's hip and hot and the place to be seen and heard online. "It's just as much about class and coolness and yuppiness and consumption (as race)."

the boundaries of good taste, readers seem to find liberation in an environment unfettered by political correctness.

Amen.

But he did sneak in one idiotic tie-in.

Yeah, no. After all, if you listened to the fine words of Obama's speechwriters as their candidate recited them, you'd have learned that we, as a nation, don't spend nearly enough time talking about race.

I am not a black man, I am not a minority. But for what the word of a white guy is worth, we spend far too much time obsessing about race BUT not nearly enough time holding everyone to the same standard.

In the wake of the Obama speech I caught newscast after newscast explaining that this was all overblown, that some (not all) Black churches are, and I quote from memory "theaters of exaggeration"  that reflect the conflict between Christian beliefs and the American experience.

Then we cut to a local story about a mixed couple (black woman, white husband).The woman repeats the national story's point about it being 'theater' and then a very nervous husband says he doesn't mind hearing such things about his own race in church because, after all, this country condoned slavery two centuries ago.

Again, crap.

(BTW - why doesn't anyone ever comment on the fact that it is almost always black reporters dispatched to do stories like this? Locally Mike Andersonhas paid his mortgage by devoting his time almost exclusively to stories set among the black community. Is it just me, or is that not instituional racism right out in the open? Why are black reporters confined to their own communites? Why don't more African-American reporters protest this fact??)

 God help me, I'm going to repeat an Ann Coulter example I heard, and I am no fan of Coulter's over the top 'theater of exaggeration' myself.

 If a white pastor was to repeat the words of Rev. Wright from the pulpit, word for word, without changing a thing, he'd be called a loon and a danger. Now imagine if he repeated them but tossed in some anti-black statements just for fun; imagine the uproar.

It would never end.

Again - oh, and it's almost painful to me -  but again, referencing Coulter, note that in Obama's speech he vilifies his white Grandmother as "[one who] on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe" while excusing Wright's comments as the result of racism he experienced.

A) his Grandmother couldn't have been too much of a racist, given that she raised, fed, housed, educated, and LOVED her half-black Grandson.

and

B) Wright was 12 years old and attending a integrated school by the time Brown V. Education took place. He may indeed have felt the sting of racism, but it was not all-pervasive as Obama hints.

I don't have the time or space to argue this to its full conclusion, but I think its poppycock to say America ignores the subject of race. We don't; what we ignore is that as time goes on it has become more and more a one way conversation.

White racism still exists, to be be sure; it hasn't slipped away into the ether.

But in response we have sadly allowed the establishment of a seperate - but unequal - culture that has a free pass to practice racism of its own.

I thought the goal of generations of Americans, both black and white, was the establishment of an equal society capable of frank and open discussions on race.

What we've acheived is a twisted and incomplete version of that; a divided culture content to spin its wheels without searching for a common ground or a way to improve relations.

And that itself is more frightening than anything Rev. Wright - or even Obama's maligned Grandmother - have ever said.

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• #1 Comment from gdireneoe 
  4/26/08 2:09 PM | Permalink

  I don't think we'l EVER come away from biased discussions.  It's been very difficult for me, living here in the south, where, racial bias is a sneaky and mean-spirited underhanded creature.  On BOTH sides.  I've watched it for twenty-five years now.  I wasn't raised here, I've lived all over the U.S..  People can fool themselves...they can lie...it IS different here in the south...still.  ...Makes me embarrassed and sick. ;)  C.