Can There Be Any Doubt Now That American Democracy Is Finished?

Leading up to the mid-term congressional elections I had many a conversation with friends who were estatic about the impending Democratic take over. The endless Republican scandals spelled doom for the party, my friends insisted, and Bush's wave of terror on both the Iraqi and American people would soon come to an end.

My expectations were far less optimistic. The Republican alternative was just not all that great to begin with. As the loyal opposition the Democrats have done little to protect the interests of the American people in the face of the Constitution-busting Bush juggernaught. One party rule has certainly enabled the Bush administration to steam roll over our democracy. But the Democrats give new meaning to the phrase "who needs enemies when we've got friends like these?" Having done absolutely nothing of substance to even attempt to slow the Republican roll, minority party or not, the Democrats were no more likely to change the course of the country while in a position of power, either. They, too, are slaves to corporate interests just like their pachydermal cousins.

Not to mention, we have suffered two elections packed with vote fraud that virtually no one within the political elite lifted a finger to address in any substantial way. We know Gore actually won, and it appears that Kerry probably did too, despite himself. The mainstream media waited until the last minute to focus on our broken democratic process, and in doing so at such a focused and intense level just prior to the election may have made voters feel powerless and stay home. After all, those Diebold machines weren't going to accurately register your choice anyway, so why bother showing up to the polls?

But no matter how much Karl Rove insisted he was Archimedes, and the mainstream pundits minimized the sound beating about to be doled out to their great white hope, the Democrats swept both the House and the Senate. Pundits were reluctantly forced to conclude that the vote was a referendum on the Iraq War and Republican malfeasance - and the American people gave a resounding "NO!!!!" to the whole kit and kaboodle. The world engaged in a collective sigh of relief as it became clear that the American people were not completely out of the minds after all.

This December 1 NYTimes article by David Sanger, however, confirms my prediction that none of it would matter anyway. The Democrats are soundly in bed with the Republicans on this thing. Liberals have been making excuses for this completely lame, so-called party of the people based on their inability to wield power from a minority position. I can think of at least two different minority groups in world history that made their all-powerful opposition eat it. The Democratic Party is for the most part composed of a group of rich white American men - the most powerful and privileged people in the history of the world! So what's their fucking excuse?

Wake up America! The first step to recovery is admitting we are in denial. We can call Chavez authoritarian all we want, but at least he won an overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan votes cast - twice. We can no longer call it a democracy when the people we vote for refuse to do what we've voted them in to do.

Technorati Tags: Iraq - Chavez - republican scandals - vote fraud - mainstream media - democrats

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Epilogue - Passing

Biracials have been passing as blacks for so long that they themselves don't even know who they are anymore. It took the perennial Vineyard vacationer Skip Gates to make it safe for the rest of us when he coyly admitted after a 50-50 genetic test result that he did, after all, remember something about his family being partly European.

In fact, all of America is confused - black, white or otherwise. And how could we not be with more than a century of biracial faces representing black ones?

Confirmed biracials (50% black/50%white)

Halle (pre-nose job), Barack Obama, Skip Gates

Hmm, if they are...what about?

Terrence Howard, Sanaa Lathan, Manning Marable

First "black" to sign with a major Holywood studio? First "black" hopeful for Tennessee Senator since Reconstruction? First "black" nominated for an Oscar?

Lena Horne, Harold Ford Jr., Dorothy Dandridge

Far be it from me to claim some biracial form of "gaydar"; however, the basic principles of heredity, summed up handily here by history and molecular anthropology PhD candidate Frank Sweet, plainly prove that what you see is what you get.
When ideology trumps reality to the point that one cannot admit that there is a difference between and , and how that difference came to be then we’ve all ceased to be rational beings. Can anyone really wonder how such cognitive dissonance as George Bush’s insistence that Saddam = Osama can exist unchecked among the American electorate for damned near 5 years, when something as basic as who we are and where we come from has been denied for the last 100? When effectively 350 years of pre-1900 history has been wiped out of the collective American memory?

Forcing our hand is the wave of mulatto Latin immigrants who have more honest racial identities, as well as the well-educated, middle class African immigrants who give lie to the blackness equals poverty equation we have so ingrained in the American psyche. The jury is still out on whether or not they will fall in line with the prevailing color line myth of the 20th century, or mount a serious challenge to its efficacy. I, for one, am ready to see the bubble burst and the whole damned thing come apart.

I spent the majority of my life being confused, feeling alienated and ashamed for not being able to conform to our American race myths. Acknowledging obvious physical and cultural markers of European heritage does not negate African heritage; French Creoles prove this and I am so glad to have met some who have provided me with a healthy and positive model to live by. Mixed race people with African heritage should not have to one drop themselves to support any group's agenda - white, black, immigrant or otherwise. I can understand the desire for white Americans and immigrants to employ One Drop Rule, as historically both groups have benefitted handsomely from it. But haven't African Americans figured out already that adopting tactics that their white oppressors have cooked up cannot ultimately be in their own best interests? It's time for African Americans to rethink their political positioning and their group identity. This one is, and she is not looking back.











These series of posts are dedicated to "the finest woman in East Elmhurst" of her day, my mother Kathlean Elizabeth Barnes. I am bold because she could not be.





Technorati Tags: Halle Berry - passing - biracial - immigrants

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Act Three - Transformation Pt. 2

Understood within the history of fluctuating racial categories in the pre-Jim Crow era, the failures of the Civil Rights Movement, contemporary color tensions within the “black” community and my own personal experiences (and probably that of many other “light-skinned” blacks) make far more sense.

Once the new industrial economic system had been fully established, and the latest wave of European immigrants were fully assimilated into “whiteness”, the American elite was prepared to concede to a change in race relations. The Civil Rights Movement was this change and it reintroduced the two color line system into American society. The integrationist and separatist factions within the 20th century’s “black” leadership have actually represented the interests of two different groups, biracials and blacks respectively. The gains of the integrationist led Civil Rights Movement ultimately only served biracial’s interests, along with those blacks that managed to attain middle class status during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods.

The black integrationist MLK, who himself married a biracial, led the charge. Although the tactics were often economic, the ends effectively called for the reintroduction of a two color line system that also held blacks at the bottom economically. The American elite answered with the legal reinstatement of rights enjoyed by some biracials pre-Jim Crow, and the end of the One Drop Rule. However, the structure that kept blacks at the bottom of the economic ladder remained intact.

When MLK began to challenge this economic order with his Poor People’s Campaign, in effect advocating for black advancement, white liberals (many belonging to ethnic groups that had just passed into “whiteness”) waned in support. MLK moved ahead anyway and was promptly assassinated.

Since then the integrationist black and biracial leadership has mostly moved into the mainstream and left blacks to fend for themselves. Hip Hop – a music and culture describing the ghetto experience – was born out of this split. Except for the nascent Black Power Movement that fizzled out in the early 70s, Hip Hop has allowed blacks for the first time to represent themselves and their struggles in their full humanity. (Unfortunately this is in danger from corporate takeover and stereotype propaganda) Some biracials have been making attempts to reject the One Drop Rule and self define as well. And the drowning of New Orleans may be influencing Louisiana Creoles to reclaim their culture and assert their mixed racial identities. The wild card in all this is biracials who continue to one drop themselves. Whether One Drop Rule will continue to serve the socio-economic interests of blacks or biracials, if it ever really did, is being put to the test with this latest wave of immigrants. Time will tell.









- These series of posts are dedicated to the ‘finest woman in East Elmhurst’ of her day, my mother Kathlean Elizabeth Barnes. I am bold because she could not be




Technorati Tags: One Drop Rule - Creoles - hip hop - Jim Crow - Civil Rights - immigrants

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Act Three - Transformation

When biracials were forced onto the black side of the color line (i.e. the Jim Crow period) they brought with them the capital inherited from two centuries of prior middle class status, which propelled them into the black upper class and the black leadership of the 20th century. This prior middle class status was not the middle class we think of today, but the legal class of people who were literally in the middle. Not Africans with no legal rights to anything and not Europeans with legal rights to everything, but Afro-Europeans who depending on the colony they were from had different levels of legal rights.

In French Louisiana biracials could own slaves, hold real estate and be recognized in court. In Spanish Florida biracials could do all that and intermarry with whites. In the British colonies biracials had varying degrees of legal status at different periods until, for reasons unique to the British situation, miscegenation was outlawed and the color line was introduced. French and Spanish biracials could teach themselves how to read and write, and along with British biracials learn skills as craftsmen and artisans. African slaves, on the other hand, were relegated to hard labor and denied education often times upon pain of death. Freed slaves quickly joined the ranks of their biracial cousins; however, in French Louisiana biracials resisted their entry into Creole society.

In the illuminating text Wealth And Democracy by lifelong Republican Kevin Phillips, the economic factors that led to the Civil War are laid out in detail. The Northern industrial machine outstripped the Southern slaveocracy in all economic indicators except for wealth itself. Slaves were worth $2-$4 billion to the Confederacy. The loss of slaves, and by extension the end of their agriculturally based economy, would mean financial ruin. The North, although quite wealthy from the budding industrial revolution, did not have the resources to compensate their ceding Southern cousins if they were to free their slaves. So war ensued.

Predictably, when the South lost it plunged into total economic collapse. The US govt. exacerbated the problem by imposing heavy taxes on the vanquished to pay off Northern war bonds and pensions for Union soldiers. Wars cost money and the victors usually don’t pay for it.

Followed by a postwar deflation that lined the pockets of bondholders, this wealth transfer according to Phillips “enabled the United States to achieve in four decades what had taken the United Kingdom nearly a century” – namely its position as the world’s leading industrial power. Over the next 80 years poor European immigrants flocked to the country’s industrial centers for a chance at a new life, and blacks and biracials migrated north in hopes of escaping the South’s economic depression.

The new capitalist industrial class now found themselves in the same position as their British colonial precursors, i.e. with a workforce comprised mostly of people of European descent – American whites, European immigrants and biracials. Taking a page out of the Virginian colonial playbook, a race-based divide and conquer strategy was legally imposed nationwide to control exploited workers who might otherwise form coalitions along class lines. American whites and European immigrants on one side, biracials and blacks on other. Jim Crow and its partner in crime One Drop Rule were born.











- These series of posts are dedicated to the ‘finest woman in East Elmhurst’ of her day, my mother Kathlean Elizabeth Barnes. I am bold because she could not be.



Technorati Tags: immigrants - One Drop Rule - Creoles - biracials - Our Kind of People

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Act Two - Journey Pt. 4

When my parents returned to America with me and my two sisters in tow, we lived for a short time in East Elmhurst, Queens. My mother had grown up there during its heyday as a middle class black neighborhood. Along with Ella Fitzgerald, Willie Mays, Tommie Agee, Louis Armstrong and Malcolm X, my Bahamian grandmother and Virginian grandfather made a home for themselves there in the postwar period.

My father's star rose in the corporate world, and he moved us out of New York City and "to the country" - known as Connecticut to tri-state dwellers. The neighborhoods in Stamford where I would live until age 15 were completely devoid of blacks. Being a classic over-achiever I was assigned to "power cog" classes, also completely devoid of blacks. The only black people I would see in my school were students in the average to remedial classes, and none of them looked like me nor did their families resemble mine. They were all darker than my father who was the darkest of my family members, and among their family whom I would see at parent teacher conferences or school events there was virtually no variation in skin color.

I knew we were all supposed to be black, but I also knew we were different. They knew it, too, and made it very clear that they did. I was regularly teased for being white, accused of being uppity, being a traitor and thinking I was superior because I was whiter. White kids treated me far, far better, but when it suited them they let me know that I didn't belong to their group either. Although I wouldn't have been able to explain it in these terms back then, I realize now that I thought of myself as a white ethnic. Like the white kids of Jewish, Irish or Italian ancestry in my classes, I thought of myself as a white person with African ancestry. My "blackness" didn't feel so fixed, encompassing and racial; it was more fluid, ethereal and ethnic. Needless to say I was lonely.

My sister and I transfered to another district and I started junior high school. It was then that we met and made fast friends with another black girl who was in a similar boat to ours. The band U2 was all the rage back then, and the three of us fantasized about starting an all-girl rock band just like theirs. We became obsessed with all things Irish, and when I discovered that my last name actually was an Irish name I immersed myself in Irish history and culture. I even went as far as identifying the family crest associated with my name.

I suspected that given the way I looked there must have been some Irish ancestry in my background. I was so much lighter and whiter looking than all the other black people I knew, even my siblings. Other black people around were so different from me. What about the name for goodness sake? I started to inquire from family members about our history and when I brought up the possibility of European ancestry I was returned with blank stares. The whispering campaign quietly began about my identity crisis, and my mother was implored to nip it in the bud.

Finally one evening my mother sat me down and asked me about my interest in all this Irish stuff. I recounted my speculation about my coloring, how other black kids didn't like me and I didn't understand them, and then I brought up our Irish surname and the family crest. Before I could say anymore my mother cut me off and said, "Your father is black, I am black and that means you are black, nothing else."

I was stunned. Fully expecting my mother to confirm my thinking, she instead decimated it. Her words cut through me and lodged in the pit of my stomach. I was having an identity crisis, after all. I suddenly felt embarassed that I didn't know who I was. Then the shame set in. All those black kids who criticized me my entire childhood were right! I was a traitor for thinking that I was anything other than black - a traitor to them and a traitor to my own family. Ashamed, I left the room and never brought up the Irish name or crest again. It would take another 18 years before I began to think of myself as a biracial person, and ironically it would be sparked by a man who looked exactly like my mother.

- These series of posts are dedicated to the ‘finest woman in East Elmhurst’ of her day, my mother Kathlean Elizabeth Barnes. I am bold because she could not be.




Technorati Tags: black middle class - identity crisis - biracial - U2

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Act Two - Journey Pt. 2

I was born on July 19, 1975 in a private hospital in the bedroom community of Wimbledon, UK. Years later my sister would tell me that the hospital staff had a running joke that I must have been the milkman’s baby. Born with pale skin and dark blue eyes, I would quickly darken like many caucasian babies do once melanin production begins. The scientifically trained hospital staff was well aware of this phenomenon, but apparently found it strange coming from the product of a medium brown black man with dark brown eyes and hair, and a light skinned black woman with medium brown eyes and hair.

I was conceived 9 months earlier in Nassau while my parents were on holiday with family. Family lore has it that my maternal grandmother was the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Irish American politician named Ralph Collins and one of his house servants, a Bahamian native. An importer who was rumored to have been a rumrunner, he built an enormous mansion in Nassau with an equally enormous wall surrounding it nicknamed Collins' Wall by the natives.

My uncle who would later settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts and become a real estate mogul in his own right, once described how painful it was to have his wealthy grandfather refuse to acknowledge him and the rest of the family. He could never understand how a man could knowingly let his children and grandchildren live in such squalor when he had so much wealth.

Himself the son of a Cornell alum, my uncle would graduate from Harvard Law and practice in Boston for several years before finally becoming a law professor full time. He married and had a son with a lawyer descended from a British family who came to Massachusetts in the early colonial period. His son would later attend college in Atlanta, settle there after graduation and become a hip hop music producer.









- These series of posts are dedicated to the ‘finest woman in East Elmhurst’ of her day, my mother Kathlean Elizabeth Barnes. I am bold because she could not be.


Technorati Tags: Bahamas - biracial - interracial

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Act Two - Journey

One of the prevailing myths of American slavery is the impermeability of the color line. Most Americans of all races believe that only Africans were slaves, only Europeans were masters, and any mixing between the two was rape pure and simple. The existence of New Orleans Creoles gives lie to this myth, of course. I suspect that 20th century Americans, especially blacks, have always felt uneasy about this because rather than hide in shame for sleeping with the enemy many Creoles proudly claim their mixed ancestry. Not too many tragic mulattos to be found here.

But travel further down the rabbit hole Alice, like I did, and you will find that reality is far more complex then that. Dig more into the history of the Spanish on our shores and you'll find that Africans and Europeans occupied each tier of society, albeit unequally. The British colonies, too, had both European and African landowners and laborers during the 17th century. To understand how this is possible, one must first understand how the management system of slavery actually works. History and molecular anthropology PhD candidate Frank Sweet explains that:

Not only was it necessary to deter runaways by making examples of those caught, but it was also vital to deter revolts by keeping on hand a traditionally large buffer class of armed yeoman. The challenge faced by colonial rulers was that the buffer class had to be roughly as numerous as the colony's forced labor population, and the forced laborers themselves were its only possible source. Like it or not, every New World colony lacking sufficient yeoman had to transform at least half of its forced laborers into landed yeomen if it was to survive.

The Spanish, by taking the place of Latin America's indigenous aristocracies, implanted their rule into pre-existing stratified societies so there was no need to recreate a yeoman class. In the Caribbean and North America, they simulated the French who intermixed with their African slaves to create a yeomen class of Creoles. In contrast, the British conquered lands that lacked indigenous empires so the Spanish tactic could not apply. And unlike the French, the British slave population initially consisted of more Europeans than Africans.

Unable to birth a biracial class of yeomen in time to control their erupting slave revolts, the British employed a race-based divide and conquer strategy that doomed African slaves to eternal servitude and graduated newly freed European indentured servants to yeomen class status. Reinforcement in the form of anti-miscegenation laws grew in severity until laws banning interracial marriage altogether were passed, and then spread from colony to colony in the British territories.

In 1705, Virginia passed history's first law defining blackness: a person with one or more great grandparents who were African - called an octoroon for having one eighth fraction of black blood. Taken together with the 1662 partus sequitur ventrum law that defined slave status through matrilineal descent, biracials still continued to be born, but at considerably slower rates of miscegenation. More importantly these two laws combined meant that, unlike the French and Spanish systems where color and class necessarily correlated, white or lighter colored skin only mattered if one were free.











- These series of posts are dedicated to the ‘finest woman in East Elmhurst’ of her day, my mother Kathlean Elizabeth Barnes. I am bold because she could not be.

Technorati Tags: slavery - Creoles - biracial - color line - miscegenation

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We’re Here! We’re Queer! Get Used to It?

The atmosphere was merry as I walked along 7th Ave yesterday with my brother who was back from Indiana for the summer. Now a vegan and unable to chow down on the customary college kid cuisine (burger n’ fries, pizza, et al), he required more humane, meatless fare. So we chose Gobo, a vegetarian joint right smack in the middle of all the gay festivities.

We left the serene confines of the West Village restaurant for the raucous street atmosphere, and immediately I was annoyed. This was not at all like me as I normally enjoy a good party. In fact, six years earlier I had marched in PrideFest 2000 along side the God’s Love We Deliver float. My sister had been volunteering for the AIDS relief organization and I gladly joined in, pleased that I could simultaneously let loose and support a worth while organization’s efforts.

But this year’s queens were getting on my damned nerves. Ironic as it may be, they just seemed so contrived. Was I getting fag fatigue? Or worse still, becoming a republican?!!! No, no my progressive credentials were still intact. Something else was amiss. It was the fags themselves that were wrong.

All that gender-bended sashaying may once upon a time have been a revolutionary challenge to mainstream sexuality and gender roles. But when straight men willingly allow five men’s queer eyes to give them the once over on cable TV, when a primetime sitcom about a gay-straight couple who shack up and play married tops the ratings year after year, and when those three annoying little words “you go girl” refuse to evaporate from the national lexicon, you know that gay culture is in no fear of disappearing.

Co-opted by the corporate powers-that-be for mainstream consumption, gayness has been thoroughly diluted and is loosing its edge. The empire has struck back folks and unlike Luke, many of those gay boys are joining their fathers. Plagued by the same bugaboos of the 60s feminist movement, racism and classism, the gay rights movement fell prey to the Faustian bargain of mainstream acceptance: a place at the table in exchange for adopting the values of America’s patriarchal, supremacist majority.

Mainstreamed gay culture is extremely elitist and subtly racist. The popularity of the show Will & Grace can no doubt be attributed to their fantastic Manhattan living. Could you imagine TV viewers being as interested in Billy Bob & Grace, the story of a closeted middle American high school drop out who shacks up with his pregnant teenaged friend as cover for his “alternative” lifestyle? And how about the “Fab Five”? African Americans have consistently been at the forefront of cutting edged fashion in the US. Yet, how is it possible to have five gay male leads on a show about fashion tips and not one be black? The coding is all there – to be gay and fabulous one must not be black, or poor (hell not even middle class!). So much for that famed Stonewall "rebellion” against the powers-that-be.

And the propaganda is clearly working, as evidenced in the instructive documentary Flag Wars about the gay-driven gentrification of the working class black community of Columbus, Ohio. In one memorable scene a wealthy white realtor, Nina Masseria, rails on camera in a drunken fit about the local blacks’ unworthiness to own property. In real life, it appears that this dike’s racism isn’t so subtle (Oh Oscar Wilde, you genius you). This same situation has replicated itself in other formally black neighborhoods like Boston’s South End, where now in an ironic twist gays are being priced out by even more upwardly mobile (mostly white) breeders. Faustian bargain, indeed.

In short, gays have ARRIVED and all the tactics they put into place to get themselves here now seem unnecessary, passé even. We know you’re here, and we’ve gotten used to it. Now what?

Technorati Tags: gay pride parade - gay culture - Queer Eye for the Straight Guy - Will & Grace - Flag Wars

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