Happy Juneteenth!

Juneteenth, June 19, is traditionally recognized as the day the last slaves, in Texas, learned of their freedom. Think of it as the Fourth of July for slaves and their descendants. Here's a website with history and suggestions for parties.

Now. Since my last posting, I've read several articles and blog posts on racism. The most interesting one, which hails from racismreview.com/blog, of course, had this letter that I'm sharing with you. I'll save commentary for later, but here're some thoughts from Ta-Nehisi Coates. Just enjoy the read and leave your thoughts. ____________________________________
Jourdon Anderson to P.H. Anderson, August 7, 1865.

SOURCE: Child, L[ydia]. Maria. The Freedmen’s Book. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865. pp. 265-267.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

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; 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.

The Audacity of Whiteness: Framing Barack Obama

Hat tip Macon D, Stuff White People Do

After you read this article via The Huffington Post, please read my post Oh, Wow! Please Read and Discuss.

The Audacity of Whiteness: Framing Barack Obama
by Jill Nelson

"This country cannot be the country we want it to be if its story is told by only one group of citizens. Our goal is to give all Americans front-door access to the truth." -- Robert C. Maynard (Maynard was one of the founders of the 30-year-old Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, which works to increase diversity in staffing, content and business operations of American media.)

I know its bad form to mention race and upset the new post-racial apple cart, the one that doesn't even have a black chauffer like the genial Hoke to drive Miss Daisy around. Nope, in this post-racial world Hoke's been laid off or taken the buy-out. (At least 300 black journalists left the print media in 2007, and there's every indication that 2008 was worse. Richard Prince's Journal-isms column at www.mije.org is an ongoing record of attrition.) In this brave new world the playing field's level, Dr. King's dream's been realized, and it's all about the meritocracy. Yet a look at the unbearably white American media reminds us that even with a black president little has changed in terms of who frames the issues. With the exception of CNN, which probably employs more black people than BET and definitely has more news coverage, for the most part media looks like a meeting of the White Citizens Council, circa 1956. As determined to retain control of the dialogue as those racists were to maintain the Southern way of life.

Why is it okay for George Will to have President Obama to dinner with conservative journalists with not a black face in the room? How many journalists attended parties in Washington during the inauguration where there were no journalists of color present? Isn't it disturbing to the journalistic establishment that the vast majority of journalists, commentators, talking heads, pundits, and experts discussing the new president and his administration are white? In 2009 can anyone seriously argue that aren't more than a handful of black, Latino, Asian, or Native Americans who fit these categories? Is this time for change we can believe in, or is it still time for black to get back?

For two years I'd managed, along with most black people, to go along with one of the unspoken shibboleths to the election of Barack Obama and kept my mouth closed about racial issues, fearing that such a discussion would be harmful to Obama. This in spite of Bill Clinton showing his ass in South Carolina; Hillary's absurd suggestion that Obama wouldn't know what to do when the phone rang at 3 AM; and John McCain's barely veiled white supremacist campaign. Yet the failure of much of the media to recognize the words of the Negro National Anthem as the first words of Reverend Joseph Lowery's benediction at the inauguration was truly pitiful. That, followed by the general incomprehension of the rhyme at the end of Lowery's remarks -- "When black will not be asked to get in back/When brown can stick around..." -- and then its erroneous attribution by a CNN employee to a civil rights song, rather than rooted in African American folk and oral tradition and the dozens -- a game of verbal insult and one-upmanship -- made it impossible to maintain silence.

It's profoundly dishonest and morally wrong that media coverage of Barack Obama and his presidency is framed by an almost exclusively white press corp. Not just the White House press corps, whose unbearable whiteness Sam Fulwood III wrote eloquently about on theRoot.com in December, 2008. Turn on the television. Most of the reporters -- the ones with shows of their own, steady jobs and influence - are white. Is there no other journalist of color in America besides Gwen Ifill of PBS' Washington Week (fabulous as she is) who could host a news show? (Sorry, CNN, the comedian D.L. Hughley doesn't count.) Apparently not, since when Ifill takes the occasional Friday off her show often becomes segregated.

The absence of African Americans is appalling in light of the plethora of white people from someplace else, especially England, getting paid to frame, spin and explain Barack Obama to Americans. I doubt that I could get a job parsing Gordon Brown to the Brits. At the "serious" magazines, the situation is dismal. Years ago, an editor at The New Yorker told me the reason there weren't more black writers at the magazine was that they didn't understand the publication's "zeitgeist."

What's really changed if the American media continues to view this new administration, and a world that is overwhelmingly populated by black, brown, and yellow people, through white eyes? In this same old world but with a new name, a Black man is president of the United States, but it takes a white man to play him on Saturday Night Live. Arrogance and privilege by another name?

Call me a retro, angry black woman -- or Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress, as Juan Williams, one of the few journalists of color white journalists deign to recognize, called Michelle Obama last weekend -- but why is it that whenever the impact of race is analyzed the role that white privilege plays is absent? In journalism, the result is always the same: white people who are granted the role of analyzing everything and everyone, including African Americans, who are as likely as not to be dismissed, overlooked, or spoken for by white expert opinion.

In reality, this post-modern, post-racial apple cart is for whites only, a dishonest and opportunistic effort to pretend race no longer matters now that Americans have elected Barack Obama president. Post racial is nothing but segregation under a kinder, gentler name, yet another effort to further enshrine white privilege and white supremacy.

What a waste, in this time of profound crisis and the possibilities Barack Obama's presidency presents, to have those possibilities identified and interpreted by whites only. Filtered through the tired lens of whiteness in a twenty-first century in which the attacks of 9/11, American failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the implosion of the markets and the collapse of capitalism are signposts along the road of the dying white culture.

In this auspicious moment, media organizations should be seeking out journalists of color and youth. Instead it's the same old white guys, many of whom seem to verge on apoplexy as they struggle to "explain" Obama. It's as if he, like Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still, fell from the sky, ahistorical, exceptionalist, and, I fear, soon to be, like Oprah or Michael Jordan, conveniently de-raced. This inability to fathom Barack Obama doesn't come as a surprise. For the most part these media heads have managed to live lives absent any serious engagement with black people or black culture. If they had, they would be familiar with the existence of the black middle class, a long-established group of overachievers whose mantra is that you have to work harder, smarter, and be better than your white counterparts to achieve the same results.

Barack Obama is neither an anomaly nor an aberration. He is simply the most successful member of this class of overachievers. His election lays to rest the myth of the meritocracy. Perhaps more amazing than the election of Barack Obama is that someone of his intellect and limitless possibility even wanted the job. Be clear: Barack Obama is part of a continuum. Now that he's broken the glass ceiling it's time for whites to step up their game. Stay tuned.

As candidate and President Obama has made clear, change we need requires sacrifice from all of us. It's not just about black kids pulling up their pants, or working harder in school, or more parental involvement. Nor is it just the overt racists and skinheads who need to get it together. The less obvious and likely more difficult change must come from the chattering class, many of them entrenched liberals and progressives to whom it has never occurred that they are the beneficiaries of white skin privilege.

There are countless black journalists and other journalists of color who can add skill, knowledge, cultural context and depth to covering America's first black president, as part of the White House press corps and in every area of journalism. They should be hired. Post-racial, bah humbug! Meritocracy, ha! I know the road to white privilege when I see it, Miss Daisy, whatever you want to call it.

L.A. Teachers Fired for Being Too "Afro-centric"

Yeah. You read right, folks. There're a few links with the details. But basically, it works like this:

A teacher in Watts, Karen Salazar, contextualized her lessons so they would be more relevant to her mostly black students. Administrators accuse her of being too "Afro-centric" and brainwashing the kids.

Ostensibly, as I've learned from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen, part of the problem with being too "Afro-centric" is that children may not love America. Oh. The horror.

This also illustrates the truth that black students don't refer to academic achievement as "acting white" for nothing. I've been there. You have to sit and listen to lies, exaggerations, denials, and half-truths, and become proficcient in reciting said lied, exagerrations, denials, and half-truths. I know did. And I hated it. This teacher shouldn't be fired. She should be given a gold medal. But her firing illustrates part of my reluctance to go into primary and secondary education. If she can get fired in Los Angeles, California for using 3-pages of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, a rap by the late Tupac Shukar, and a Langston Hughes poem, when I start teaching about the horror of slavery, the re-enslavement of African Americans after the Civil War, and the dozens of white racist riots around the country (And by that I mean, a least couple of dozens. There were probably more.), the African societies the slaves came from, the Black Freedom Movement and the backlash to the Movement - I could not just lose my job, they might even take my kids!

No, I don't have any, but you get my point. This firing is nonsense. And it's not the Los Angeles United School District that's "unique" here. Ms. Salazar is the unique one. Not many teachers take the chance she did. And kudos to her.

Here are those other links:
Feminsite
L.A. Times
VivirLatino
AngryBrownButch
Democracy Now!