You Big Dummy

A couple of weeks back, while on the Upper East Side of Texas,* we were leaving the largest and finest Wal-Mart in Wood County just as an intense-looking, muscled-up 30ish black man was heading into the store, pushing an empty shopping cart. As we drew closer, we noticed the guy, who had a faint resemblance to the actor Tim Reid in his younger days, was wearing only a T-shirt (in addition to pants and shoes, of course, and possibly socks), even though it was, literally, 23 degrees F outside. Then his T-shirt registered: On it was emblazoned a picture of Red Foxx-as-Fred Sanford, and underneath Red/Fred’s familiar mug was one of Fred G.’s signature epithets/catchphrases, either “Dummy” or “You Dummy” or “You Big Dummy” (we forgot our notebook and memory subsequently has failed us). We drew down on our storehouse of stereotypes––it is quicker, as George Clooney said in that movie––and a couple of quick orienting thoughts sped through our mind: “This guy must spend all his free time pumping weight––he’s gotta be a fireman,” and, ““This guy’s too young to remember seeing Sanford and Son, except in reruns.” As we passed into the man’s proximate space, the sheer frontal absurdity and classical timeliness of the message caused us to smile a friendly smile and let loose with an audible snort of a laugh, but the guy just shifted his eyes ever so slightly and shot us a look that we interpreted, probably wrongly, to say, “Not up for any BS today, my man” or, “I’d just as soon stab you in the heart as contemplate your continued existence.”**

We doubtless were way off-base, and it’s possible, even likely, that this hardy dude wasn’t aware of our presence and was actually looking off into space, yet the cognitive dissonance brought on by the guy’s hard look and the fun-stering T-shirt message caused us to immediately abandon plans to politely inquire about what we were dying to know: “Where can we get a shirt like that?”***

Instead, we kept on pushing out into the cold, bearing our White Man's Burden.

*A coinage we have ripped off, wholesale, from County Line Magazine.

**Come to think of it, Foxx’s schtick-in-trade, before TV rounded off his rough edges and transformed him into the lovable but irascible junkman, was full-frontal hostility, as we learned from brief but sustained exposure to his pre-Sanford “party records” while in high school. These were then deemed “adult” or “off-color,” although they more aptly were referred to as “dirty” and might even still be “dirty” by today’s lapsed standards. It’s unlikely, though, that Foxx’s Sanford banter with the comedienne La Wanda Page would be permitted these days, since it was premised on dark-skinned and extremely unattractive Page’s Aunt Esther being hectored and insulted (“You belong in the zoo!”) by Foxx, who of course was light enough to be known as “Red.” Who says humankind has made no progress?

***As we suspected, it is available on the Internet. Where else?

Blood’s Thicker than Mud: It’s a Family Affair*

When it comes to Gatesgate—the mock “scandal” that, having persisted long past its acceptable expiration date, is beginning to emit an unhealthy odor—our sympathies, limited as they are, lie with the cop. Unlike in this closer-to-home incident, which, based on the available public record, appears to have been an actual, authentic case of RACIAL PROFILING, one with near-lethal consequences for the profilee, the Cambridge, Mass. officer was not out trolling the streets for innocent black men to arbitrarily stop and hassle but was instead dutifully responding to an emergency call—one in which the race/ethnicity of the allegedly, possibly, but possibly not suspicious "gentlemen" (suspicious, that is, to the neighbor who didn’t recognize her neighbor—goddamn, lady!) was not even clear to the caller.

The best take on L’Affaire Gates has been one we initially saw voiced by none other than Mika Brzezinski, the comely sidekick to cable TV’s Morning Joe (it's probably been articulated elsewhere, we dunno), who suggested that had it been two women at the house in Cambridge the confrontation would ended much differently, or wouldn’t have grown into much of a confrontation at all (to which we’d say: most likely, but of course it depends on which two women you’re talking about). To embellish Brzezinski's theory with further truthiness we’d note that the two men in this manly meeting of the minds—a tall Boston-Irish cop and a short Harvard professor—are doubtless conditioned to being constantly deferred to by other men during the course of a normal day (cue T. Petty’s Won’t Back Down). Still, we must wonder what sort of Harvard professor would tell a cop, “I’ll step outside with your mama,” as the cop claims Henry Louis Gates did. (Answer: One who knew he could get away with it.) It’s a shame that Red Foxx is no longer with us, for many reasons—one of them being that he will not be available to portray Gates in the upcoming straight-to-DVD movie “High Noon on Ware Street.”

Having had some first-hand experience in police-community relations as a young person (a young white person), we know damn well that had we, even at our advanced years, suggested that we’d like to pursue a sexual relationship with a police officer’s mother, we, too, would not have beaten the ride downtown. More than likely we’d find our self face-down on the concrete with a bony knee in our back.

It was, of course, unwise for our president to wade into the matter, and in such seemingly uninformed manner, but as part of his lifelong quest to establish his bona fides as an Authentic Black Man he must occasionally offer up a little something for the brothers and sisters. Still, his gracious recovery the following day—and his manning-up and calling the officer from the department he had accused of acting “stupidly”—was welcome, and of near-perfect pitch. As for those Republicans fanning the noxious odor by calling on Obama to apologize to the cop: Yes, Obama should apologize, right after Bush and Cheney stand up and apologize for Iraq.

*Truism once propounded by Sly and the Family Stone, a multiracial musical combo from the late 1960s that later disintegrated because of the bandleader’s taste for cocaine.

Wherever Injustice Rears Its Head, City Councilman Jarvis Johnson Will Be There to Loose His Terrible Swift Sword, Or at Least to Write an Op-Ed Piece

City Councilman Jarvis Johnson, who when last we noticed him was pitching on behalf of a no-bid contract extension for an airport concessionaire, and previous to that was knee-deep in December's raging CAFR controversy (you remember it, do you not?), was accorded 14 or so inches* on the opinion page of Friday’s Houston Chronicle to explain why he motored over to Jena for Thursday’s big march. We’re not sure that anybody asked for or needed a justification from the councilman, or even noticed him there among the estimated 10,000 (according to the New York Times) or “tens of thousands” (according to lefty Amy Goodman of radio’s Democracy Now!) of protestors who took to the streets (street?) of the Louisiana town.

But there it is, as they say.

The councilman, of course, was way too young for Selma and Montgomery or even the Herman Short-TSU riot, so it’s understandable that he’d be moved by the opportunity to make his bones as a front-line combatant against injustice. And right here, lest we find our humble blog being linked by David Duke’s Web site, we’d like to stipulate into the record that we do believe there was an injustice committed in LaSalle Parish and that the prosecution of the “Jena Six” has been way out of proportion to the crime. Alleged crime.

Yes, there is an allegation of a “crime” at the back of all this, and while it may have been only one small crime in a string of crimes large and small dating back to the beginnings of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, somebody got hurt. There’s a lot of murk in the entire story---here’s a quick summation by Meagan McArdle---but there doesn’t seem to be any question that the six black boys stomped a white boy’s ass, and if you get knocked unconscious in a brawl, or somehow “fall” into unconsciousness, as has been suggested, then you have indeed suffered an illegal ass-kicking, whether or not you’re up and about three hours later, as the victim is said to have been. But the councilman, who’s quick to invoke the Scottsboro Boys and Jim Crow, gives the crime the following passing mention:

… a schoolyard brawl ensued as a direct result of several white students hanging nooses on a tree that certain whites assumed was reserved for Whites Only…**

A schoolyard brawl … and that’s it. The crime is just an inconvenient fact that doesn’t fit Johnson’s assumed narrative, which seems to be that this one episode in a backwards and out-of-the-way burg*** somehow means the entire nation is a seething cauldron of double standards and racist motive.

Most of the information we’ve gleaned on the story has come from listening to Goodman’s show on KPFT-FM, 90.1. Goodman’s been on the story for months (by contrast, our local daily newspaper, the largest daily newspaper in the region, belatedly decided to parachute a reporter in for some undistinguished wire service-style reportage on the protest) and despite her biases has been talking to all comers and occasionally wandered into the realm of even-handedness. Today we heard her interview the mother of the white schoolboy victim, a manager at the local Super Wal-Mart, who asked whether the protestors believed the Jena 6 should escape any punishment at all for the beating of her son. This is a good question (although we personally think the kid who’s already done 10 months while appealing his conviction has done more than enough time). It’s a question that possibly Councilman Johnson could answer in his next op-ed contribution.

In the meantime, we must agree with the councilman’s explanation for his trip to Jena:

Some might say a Houston City Council member has no business meddling in the affairs of an issue in Central Louisiana. I beg to differ, because if an injustice can happen in Central Louisiana, it can also happen in Northeast Houston in District B.

Yes, it sure can. It can happen anywhere. It can even happen in Durham, N.C.


* Rough estimate.

**The nooses and the Honky Tree are the sort of phenomena that give us pause whenever we start fantasizing about moving away to enjoy our old age in a quiet little town.

***We attribute some of our own interest in this story to our having once worked with a girl from Jena who told wickedly funny stories about the place (she was a female Junior Samples), most of which we cannot repeat on a family blog.

We Take Part in the Ongoing National Dialogue on Race, Installment 347

“We got a sense that the healing has now begun.”
-- Greg Hurst, anchorman, Channel 11 News, Houston, putting a Cronkite-ian flourish on Friday’s report on the meeting between Don Imus and the Rutgers women’s basketball team

Certainly there were many more pressing concerns to occupy the national mind, such as last week’s stunning breach of security in the Green Zone (“On the other hand, the pacification is proceeding …” – Charles Krauthammer, deep thinker), but the Imus Affair quickly shifted into an uncharted dimension beyond the reliable “contrition and rehabilitation” script usually followed when some celebrity (whether of the A, B or C lists) steps too far over the line in his or her public utterances. How cruel the fate: to be condemned by Ann Coulter (!) and defended by Tom DeLay, who apparently was not among the audiences on the mornings when Imus referred to the former congressman from Sugar Land as the product of a brother-sister coupling (or something equally as lame).

Still, we figured its shelf life might not extend beyond the weekend, as some new spectacle or another would debut in the Big Top while Imus slunk off to peddle auto insurance on satellite radio. Then we heard Oprah declare her intent to explore “After Imus?” on Monday, an hour surely to be given over to a deep probing of “feelings” and expressions of “hurt” and the arduous seeking and finding of that elusive “healing” (or maybe that’s “heeling”).

If only Ann Coulter could be there, in a very short skirt.

It turns out our 13 year old’s Texas history teacher was way ahead of Oprah in using Imus (he being an important figure in Texas history) to launch a discussion on race and ethnicity and disparaging terms. While the 7th graders were unanimous in condemning the elderly white man, many, including some black students, took issue with his firing (our daughter, an Imus hater of longstanding, not being one). She reported that the teacher, in what must have been an awkward instructional moment, stressed that it was NOT OK for those outside a racial/ethnic category to use the apparently familial terms employed inside the group (like ’ho, we guess). Our daughter cited the example of “Cubans” at her very diverse school who refer to one another as “beaners”*; our 17-year-old son, briefly passing through the discussion on his way to the icebox, observed that these self-I.D.’ed beaners probably were Mexicans and asked if our daughter was aware of the term’s etymology. We then felt compelled to point out that most white Cubans we’ve known generally look down on other Hispanics because, as our son added from the kitchen, they consider themselves to be of “purer” Spanish blood.

Seeking to return to the issue at hand, we asked if black kids at our daughter’s school refer to white kids as “crackers,” and she gave us the duh-uh ... and replied, Yeah, sure, some do---and some Hispanics, too (we knew the answer already). Wandering back through on his way to his room, our soon volunteered that at his very diverse school the pejorative for whites favored by black and Hispanic gangsta types is “white bitch”---directed toward males of the Caucasian persuasion.

So, sure, let’s have that discussion, let’s keep yammering about it until Imus falls off the wagon or blows his brains out, but be advised that, to paraphrase early Fleetwood Mac---back before they had sniffed cocaine or laid eyes on Stevie Nicks and her scarves---it might not yield the answers that you want it to. If we want to make it more than just these little tableaux of self-validation or displays of moral hauteur, let’s strip away the hypocrisy and double standards, starting with those of CBS, which after years of tolerating similar remarks by Imus and his yukking buddies withdrew its original suspension and canned him more than a week after his “nappy-headed ’ho’s” crack---if its was a firing offense on Thursday it should have been a firing offense the day he said it---and MSNBC, which terminated his show earlier in the week but then for two days devoted the same airtime (and lots more, almost around-the-clock) to coverage of Imus’s downfall moderated by NBC correspondent David Gregory, a frequent guest of Imus’s (sheesh---we originally typed “Dick Gregory”; this race talk leaves us feeling logy). As far as we know, Imus has not agreed to be one of Gregory’s guests during the time spot he formerly occupied.

Then we could move on to all the pious African-American academics and journalists and social commentators solemnly weighing in with their ritual condemnations of Imus (so far so good) but who verbally look the other way when their (usually white) interlocutors timorously pipe up, “Yes, sir or madam, but what of this vile rap music so beloved by today’s youth, with its talk of ’ho’s and bi’ches and so forth?” or “Yes, Mr. Sharpton, but what of your promotion of the false changes against the Duke lacrosse players?” (as if expecting Sharpton to break down and summarily offer a heartfelt apology).

Imus in a sense was absent-mindedly backstroking along in the larger popular culture, although in an end of the pool where he wasn’t allowed, a point made more succinctly by our wife, also no fan of Imus---the chicks just didn't dig Imus---on the first day of the commotion, when she noted that “nappy headed ’ho” was exactly the sort of thing (maybe the exact thing) that one of her students would have said to a classmate---that is, a black male to a black female---back when she taught middle school, long before the pervasiveness of hip-hop culture or whatever you call it: “And since when did Imus start talking like a seventh grader from [South Park]?” (Note to our reader[s] in France: this South Park being a southeast Houston neighborhood, not the TV show, although that would work, too, if you wish.)

We hesitate to use “the lynch mob” metaphor, because as a white Southerner we’re sensitized to the reality of that term, but there’s something so unseemly about the piling-on and face-stomping that it's left us feeling sympathetic toward Imus and bereft at his passing. So for healing we’ll turn to the red-meat wisdom of our coozan, Pat Buchanan (yet another frequent Imus guest):

Imus threw himself on the mercy of the court of elite opinion – and that court, pandering to the mob, lynched him. Yet, for all his sins, he was a better man than the lot of them rejoicing at the foot of the cottonwood tree.

Yes, asshole that he is (was).

*A slur that we first became acquainted with as a 6 or 7 year old reading the educational book Texas History Movies.