This Is Why Black Folks'll Probably Stay on the Democratic "Plantation"

:eyeroll:

Ten conservatives who have praised slavery

10. Rep. Loy Mauch. This Arkansas GOP state legislator has found biblical support for his pro-slavery position. He wrote to the Democrat-Gazette to inquire, “If slavery were so God-awful, why didn’t Jesus or Paul condemn it, why was it in the Constitution and why wasn’t there a war before 1861?

And just think, he's only #10. There're 9 more!

It's Their Economy (Not Yours), Stupid!

Great article. I disagree that the majority of white Southerners aren't to blame for voting for their own misfortune, but other than that, aces. ~ Blaque Swan (@No1_BSwan)

Slave States vs. Free States, 2012

. . .

Protecting the prerogatives of the Southern economic elite and the politicians it owns from external interference is the rationale for the defense of states’ rights, in the 21st century as in the 19th and 20th.  While they demonize “the federal government” as though it were some external force, Southern conservatives are actually afraid of democracy — national democracy.  They are afraid of their fellow Americans outside of the region they control.  They are afraid that national majorities will impose unwelcome reform on the South, at the expense of their profits and privileges, as national majorities did during Reconstruction, the New Deal and the civil rights revolution.

. . .

I can't very well copy/paste the entire article. So here's the rest of it here.

"GOP as I Say, Not as I GOP"?

Why won’t the GOP talk about affirmative action?

. . .

While conservatives mount their hard-line attacks in court, party leaders are scrambling to find and promote minorities, both to run for key offices and to serve in the highest levels of government. In a party where 9 out of 10 members are white, according to Pew surveys, that effort requires fast-tracking minorities over equally qualified white candidates. Today’s Republican leaders have a tortured relationship to affirmative action – they tip the scale for diversity in electoral politics but blast college admissions officers who do the same thing.

...

Finish reading here.

Race Is a Biological Concept(?)

In Chicago in 1980, black and white women died of breast cancer at the same rate. Today, despite being slightly more likely to get breast cancer, white female Chicagoans are half as likely to die from it. Could the difference in death rates be due to genetic differences between black and white women?
. . .

Race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people’s health. Understanding race as a political category does not erase its impact on biology; instead, it redirects attention from genetic explanations to social ones.

Check out this article in Boston Review by Anne Fausto-Sterling: Bodies with Histories: The New Search for the Biology of Race.

In it, Fausto Sterling reviews these three important and thought-provoking books:

• Richard C. Francis, Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance. W. W. Norton, $25.95 (cloth)
• Ann Morning, The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference. University of California Press, $26.95 (paper)
• Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. New Press, $29.95 (cloth)

Extreme Sport: Being Black

Before getting to the Chad Holley situation, let me just remind you, re Trayvon Martin, that white Americans routinely have visual perception problems when it comes to encounters between a white person and a person of color.

Now to Chad Holley's beating, verdict for the first of four cops charged with oppression (Yeah, that made no sense to me either.) was announced yesterday: not guilty. Make no mistake about it folks, prosecutors don't want everybody serving on the jury. You have got to honor your jury summons and serve on the jury. It's not just your legal "duty," it's your moral obligation.

And to my previous question, the answer appears to be no.