People still want to discuss the ongoing ghastliness in Ferguson, MO, but the thread dedicated to that in Good Morning, America is getting old…and as a spam defensive measure, commenting on posts older than three months is automatically shut down. No exceptions allowed.

So here’s a fresh new post to accumulate comments!

There’s something deeply wrong in the world. The New York Times is reporting that the rich are stratifying into the merely obscenely rich, and the absurdly pornographically rich.

Philip Rushton has been selling private jets to the global rich for more than three decades. In just about every economic cycle, sales of small jets and big jets tended to move together — rising and falling with financial markets and fortunes of the wealthy.

Now, however, the jet market is splitting in two. Sales of the largest, most expensive private jets — including private jumbo jets — are soaring, with higher prices and long waiting lists. Smaller, cheaper jets, however, are piling up on the nation’s private-jet tarmacs with big discounts and few buyers.

[Read more…]

Richard Dawkins tweeted something yesterday (cue foreboding music, cawing of ravens, the rumble of distant thunder):

Oh NO. Just checked my privilege. Turns out I'm a white heterosexual male. http://t.co/3I1J1dWRrq How can I atone? Hair shirt? Flagellation?

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) November 8, 2014

[Read more…]

It’s almost Halloween, and people are decorating their houses and yards. One person in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, put a display up that elicited this mild reaction.

Fort Campbell Public Affairs officer Brendalyn Carpenter said that it was "her understanding that the display was not intended to be offensive, but authorities deemed it could be interpreted as such. She said the occupant did extend an apology about the decorations."

Oh, not intended to be offensive, but could be interpreted, possibly uncharitably and unfairly, as such. Where have I heard that kind of notpology before? It seems to be a fairly common sentence construction in English.

Of course, then you see a photo of the display and wonder how anyone could possibly see it as inoffensive.

[Read more…]

Apparently, the Morehouse football team needs to be sidelined and given some lessons on homophobia. It’s pretty screwed up when a group of black men cheer on a white racist beating up a black guy because he is gay.

I don’t know if Morehouse College offers LGBT sensitivity training, but it should have someone come speak to the football team. Even if you don’t approve of homosexuality, to come to a city as a football team, representing your college and your hometown, and to spit hate and vitriol in a room that includes other people, including LGBT people — it is not OK. What kind of school sends out ambassadors of hate? Can it be the same one that sent out Dr. King? Hewing to the stereotype of black homophobia makes Morehouse and the black community weaker, and there are real victims. Lionel may be fictional, but his treatment was not. It’s a shame that “Dear White People”’s message of acceptance didn’t reach everyone in the room.

I would like everyone to read this wonderful twist in perspective on American history — I think this kind of thing ought to be taught in public schools. The United States of America is exceptional: in the ferment of the 18th century, we invented both an inspiring political document, our constitution, and we invented white people. Not the people themselves, but the abstract distinction that set up “whiteness” as a mark of a privileged class. It was brilliant: it was a strategy that immediately divided those lower class rabble rousers who were screaming for equality, and set them to fighting among themselves, and half of them fighting for the wealthy upper class.

As time went on, the labor needs of the land holders continued to grow, and desperate to cultivate the land, they were loathe to let go of their bond servants and the bondsmen and bondswomen’s children (whom they kept in bondage for a legally defined time as well). In the mean time, a growing American peasantry was proving as difficult to govern as the European peasantry back home, periodically rising up in riot and rebellion, light skinned and dark skinned together. The political leaders of the Virginia colony struck upon an answer to all these problems, an answer which plagues us to this day.

The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the whites. They gave the whites certain rights, and took other rights from blacks. White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the 1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of America.

…

This plan worked gorgeously. It broke all efforts of the majority of people, African or European, to fight for civil and political rights in America against a landed class that literally ruled everything. It reduced a portion of the people to the status of the negro slave, and gave the poor but now white people a precious and entitled inch to stand above the permanently enslaved on the social ladder. The next thing the politicians did sealed the deal: they paid poor whites a bounty for runaway slaves, and often made them overseers for slaves, turning every poor white in America into a prison guard against the people who had once been their neighbors and allies.

[Read more…]