Category: WTF?

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Racism and Reparations, Oh My!

Over the past 10 days or so I’ve been seeing articles about California paying reparations to black folks.

I was pleased to see that beach front land LA County had stolen from an African American family had finally been returned to the family. There is no excuse for anyone to lose their property, either land, or personal possessions, simply because of the color of their skin. LA County righted a wrong they committed long ago, and it was about damn time. 

There was a time when racism was rampant, horrific, and wrong on its face. The only reason LA County had been able to take this family’s land was because racism was at the time, tacitly approved of and LA County had the power of City Hall and people who could corrupt the law. 

This once again proves the old saying, “You can’t fight City Hall”

Less pleasing is the California Reparations board. If this board was looking for similar instances of injustice as described above. Then I’d be totally on board. The problem is, California Reparation seems to be more about cash payments. Cash payments made from our tax dollars in a state that didn’t have African slavery. 

For me this raises some questions. 

Will California be paying reparations to members of the Native Tribes whose ancestors were in fact enslaved and whose servitude built Churches up and down the state under Spanish or Mexican rule?

Will California pay reparations to the descendants of Irish children taken off the streets of Dublin and sold into slavery in American slave markets right along with slaves from Africa?

How is California going to determine who gets these reparations? Will they use DNA sequencing? Or will the state resort to simply looking at the color of a person’s skin? The former is invasive, the latter is going to automatically exclude groups of people who through no fault of their own might not be dark enough. What about people who may be albino?

There was a time when America had something called the one drop rule. If a person had any ancestor who was African they were considered Black regardless of their appearance. Interestingly, when the NAZIs were trying to come up with a method to single out Jews for extermination, NAZI’s felt that the one drop rule was too extreme. They chose a genealogical method based on a Jewish family member being some number of generations back. Five generations, no problem. Only four generations back? Sorry you’re going to the camps. I wonder what criteria the California Reparations board will use.

Then there was the African American activist who said in print, anything less than $800,000 per person would result in severe consequences. Wow! That sounds more like an old MAFIA protection racket. What severe consequences? Riots, looting, buildings burning? Oh, in other words a typical Wednesday in Los Angeles.

When I read that article, my first thought was how about zero dollars? Your terms are completely acceptable. Burn down your neighborhoods or the entire city. Just realize that your actions have consequences and one of those consequences would likely be that you’ll not have a place to plug in that 75” TV you stole from the Best Buy. You can also look forward to 20 years of no-one investing in businesses or buildings in the neighborhoods you destroy. Y’all might want to loot some tents from the REI or Walmart while you’re at it.

There was another piece reported out of San Francisco about a pilot program where the city leadership was making payments of 1000 a month for two years available to poverty stricken people.

Great! Help those people get their footing and work their way out of poverty.  But reading the fine print, this is only available to African Americans. Apparently poverty is only poverty if you’re the right color. White people living in poverty and squalor is of no concern to the leadership of San Francisco.

San Francisco is also making similar payments available to pregnant poor single women. Again Great! But the fine print again specifies only African American need apply. This particular plan is being implemented in Los Angeles, and other smaller cities throughout the state. 

I’m sorry, but this is racism on its face. Poverty is poverty, pregnant is pregnant, regardless of the color of your skin.

I thought we had laws to prevent discrimination of any kind. 

Clearly I missed a memo on the nuance of racial discrimination. 

Growing up I was taught that any discrimination was bad and not to be tolerated.

Since these days it’s enough to simply identify as a woman to be called and treated like a woman.  I find myself wondering is it enough to identify as African American to be treated like an African American and therefore be eligible for these cash payments? How about if I identified as a black woman and pregnant?

“My baby daddy ran off with some skinny white girl! I need a grand a month to raise this baby!” 

I doubt it would work. 

This kind of thing is how racism is perpetuated.

For years African Americans have protested and in some cases rioted over being treated as less than. Leaders in government have been solicitous and forgiving, they’ve promised to make funding available and bring an end to racism in exchange for votes.

What will those leaders do or say when the shoe is on the other foot? How will they respond to white people protesting and rioting against clearly racist behavior targeted at them?

Or will we have the Southern Poverty Law Center designating impoverished white communities as white supremacist terror cells, then calling for these communities to meet the same fate as Ruby Ridge, or Waco? 

I find that I’m not particularly surprised when I hear white people saying things like, “We need to move someplace where the demographics are more favorable.” Which is nothing more than a polite way of saying, We need to move someplace where there are only white people.

The problem is, if white people were to carve out a couple of states and cede the rest of the country to people of color, that would be called racism. It would never be tolerated and particularly so, if white people built for themselves a nice place. This is not to say white people are more capable than anyone else, but we already have the example suburbia provided. 

At one time moving to the suburbs was called “White Flight”. The cores of cities were given over to people who, at the time,  were legitimately on the wrong side of the racial equation. People of color were ghettoized and then rightfully got angry at being mistreated and forgotten. The common explanation for these ghettos being crime ridden was these folks were desperate, and impoverished.

I suspect that while there was, at the time,  certainly a racial component to white flight, there was something else. White people simply got tired of trying. When it became easier to move to suburbia where everything was new, clean, planned and safe. Places where education was good and crime was largely unheard of, white people chose the path of least resistance.

I’m not afraid of living with people of color, I’m just tired of playing some kind of appeasement game where the goal posts are always in sight but moved at the last minute. I’ve worked with people who are actually from Africa. They have always been kind, hardworking people like myself, with similar values and expectations. On more than one occasion Africans have asked what the hell is up with African Americans? I’ve answered, that I haven’t a clue.

I find myself getting quite tired of trying anymore. I’m sick of being called names. So sick of it that I’ve actually looked into moving to a completely different country. Call it the ultimate white flight.

I’ve also considered getting a job in Antarctica. This would take me out of the USA and put me in a small community where everyone is dependent on each other for survival. I’ve been curious to find out if, in that kind of situation, the whole racism narrative falls apart and people are just people again.

I don’t believe in racism. I think it’s stupid and destructive. That being said, my experiences with people of color in California have taught me that I’m apparently in the minority regardless of race. 

It’s because of these lived experiences that I want to go somewhere and live among people that look just like me. I want to eliminate the racial stuff and if someone who looks just like me commits a crime, they get the same justice as everyone else.

I don’t want to live someplace where I, or anyone else, is favored or punished simply because of the color of their skin or ethnicity. Until ten or fifteen years ago, I thought that was where America was headed. Now I feel like we’ve taken a step 50 years into the past and are in the process of inverting all the rules too.

In my opinion, stepping back in time and inverting the rules is nothing more than revenge. It’s not a step toward equality at all. 

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I thought it was just tit for tat, not anymore.

When some pundits and politicians started calling for a cognitive test for President Biden, I honestly thought it was them just being dicks. I thought is was probably payback for calls for similar tests during Trump’s presidency.

I don’t think Biden is the sharpest knife in the drawer generally, but after reading about his performance trying to put bicycle handles on a bike at a Toys for Tots event, I can sort of see their point.

Apparently The President couldn’t put a round tube inside another round tube. Makes you wonder if he has similar problems in the bedroom.

At this point, I’d love to see him working with one of those child’s toys where you match the different shaped wooden blocks with the appropriately shaped holes. That’s a toy that while exercising a child’s mind also serves as a cognitive reasoning test allowing parents to gauge a child’s development.

Perhaps I’m being unkind, but come on. Now, it’s possible that he couldn’t focus properly on the top of the bike, but if that’s true he needs to get to the White House Ophthalmologist for a check up. Perhaps it’s time for sleepy Joe to get a pair of glasses. If he’s having a visual focusing problem, it begs the question; Is he reading the stuff coming across his desk?

Generally speaking I don’t read anything the Joe or the White House put out. Most anything they say gets retracted a day later so it’s best to wait for the dust to settle before getting worked up about it. Even after the dust has settled, most of the time I find myself shaking my head in dumbfounded amazement that these are the people in control. This one though, was even more dumbfounding than usual so I read it when it came out.

I’ve dealt with an assortment of pretty insane, and stupid people over my lifetime. The saddest part, is that I’d rather have them running things instead of what we’ve got now.

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This is one definition of irony!

According to the Associated Press:

Mexico is using images and video of a Philadelphia Street to warn children in Mexico about the ills of drug abuse.

The actual article is linked below:

Mexico depicts Philadelphia street scenes in anti-drug ads

I’d laugh but this is so fucking sad, I almost can’t believe it. At first I thought it was a satire article from The Babylon Bee.

Unfortunately as is the often the case these days, much of what should be satire is entirely true.

The real kicker for me personally is that the folks from Philadelphia are more concerned that the videos and images of homeless drug addicts shambling around the city, may have been used without permission of the people appearing in them.

Uhh… Maybe you should be more concerned with the drug problem, crime, and violence in your city than whether the addicts gave their permission to be filmed. Odds are good that even if they’d given permission in exchange for their next fix, they wouldn’t remember it. 

Good God almighty! Where the hell are our priorities?

Here is the article for your convenience.

From The Associated Press

Mexico depicts Philadelphia street scenes in anti-drug ads

By MARK STEVENSON and MARYCLAIRE DALE
November 11, 2022

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The Mexican government is using video of homeless people and open-air drug users in Philadelphia’s embattled Kensington neighborhood in a national ad campaign to try to scare young people away from drugs.

The spots never identify the city or neighborhood shown. But just how or why the Mexican government decided to use street scenes from the U.S. to scare Mexicans — who have their own drug problems — is not clear. Critics say the ads recycle scare tactics about drugs rather than offer help or treatment.

Jesús Ramírez, the spokesman for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, proudly presented the ad series Tuesday. But Ramírez did not respond to repeated requests for comment as to where the government got the Philadelphia videos or why they used them.

The use of the videos, apart from sparking concern over Philadelphia’s image, or whether those filmed had given their consent, raised questions, in part because Mexico is the source of most of the fentanyl being sold in the United States.

In one spot presented Tuesday entitled “Crystal” (meth), a Spanish-speaking narrator says, in a voice-over above scenes of drug users shaking or contorting along trash-strewn Kensington Avenue, “Crystal (meth) finishes you off quickly, it takes away hunger and tiredness and causes hallucinations and psychosis. It damages the body and mind.”

The Philadelphia Mayor’s Office acknowledged the drug problem but said it is not limited to one city or neighborhood, and noted that all people are capable of “hope, healing, and resilience.”

“The opioid and overdose crisis in Philadelphia is part of a national and even international epidemic, and we agree it is important for everyone to understand, as this video notes, that all street drugs now present an elevated risk of overdose because of fentanyl’s extreme prevalence,” a spokesperson for Mayor Jim Kenney said.

“Having said that, it is always hard to see our city’s people and neighborhoods portrayed in a limited and negative light. No neighborhood, and no person, should be defined by this tragic and widespread crisis,” they said.

Philadelphia is debating solutions to the overdose crisis — Kenney supports proposals for supervised injection sites — while the number of overdose deaths continues to climb, reaching 1,276 deaths last year.

Another Mexican spot depicts scenes of drug users or homeless people slumped or standing unsteadily in Kensington, which can be identified by transit signs in the videos.

“Now the narcos are adding fentanyl to hook you from the first time you use. Fentanyl kills,” the narrator says in Spanish. “It is 50 times more potent than heroin. Two hundred people die every day from using it. Don’t risk it!”

However fentanyl use remains relatively low in Mexico — almost all is exported to the United States — while there are plenty of meth and crack users.

Only one of the government anti-drug ads — one focusing on glue-sniffing — used recognizably Mexican street footage. Other scenes show people wearing sweatshirts that say “California” and “Barcelona.”

“These are terrible ads; they’re truly terrible,” said Mexico security analyst Alejandro Hope. “They are badly thought out, badly produced, and they are the result of bad public policy. There is no public health message there.”

Instead of offering help, hotlines, advice or treatment options — which in the public sector are almost non-existent in Mexico — Hope said they repeated the most aggressive U.S. drug-scare tactics of the 1980s.

“I don’t think these ads are aimed at users, at youths at risk,” said Hope. “I think these are aimed at a wider and much more conservative audience that viscerally rejects any kind of drug use and whose moral buttons you want to push, to generate a moral terror.”

López Obrador, while he projects himself as a leftist, has actually been “deeply conservative” on issues like drugs, abortion, the family and women’s rights, Hope said.

Quetcy Lozada, elected Tuesday to represent the Philadelphia City Council district that includes Kensington, said the area includes many hard-working families who want to stay and make things better. But the ads and frequent media attention only draw more users and curiosity-seekers to the streets — and more problems, she said.

“Philadelphia has so many amazing places and so many amazing people, it embarrasses me that this is the type of footage that is being used,” Lozada said. “(It’s) just not acceptable.”

In a TV ad entitled “Crack,” the narrator says, in a voice-over with street scenes in Kensington. “Taking crack cocaine damages your brain and heart and causes anxiety and paranoia.” The ad quickly segues into scenes of homeless people, apparently filmed at a nearby park.

Kelly Garant, a peer care coordinator in Philadelphia for a nonprofit organization, helps people struggling with addiction, as she once did, get medical and other services.

“They are actually in a state of crisis, and to be exploited when they’re that vulnerable, it’s just not acceptable,” Garant said. “You don’t know whose mother or father or brother that is.”

Years from now, she said, they may have their lives back on track, but the images could still be out there — for their children, friends and work colleagues to see.

Addiction, she said, “doesn’t discriminate.” It’s just less visible in other neighborhoods.

“In other parts of the city, people overdose in their homes,” she noted. “If they’re talking about anti-drug campaigns, there are people doing drugs inside their homes and we can’t get to them.”

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Dale reported from Philadelphia