If I was a poor black kid...I would not know about subjunctive tenses...

A Forbe's columnist, Gene Marks, has many people talking about what it's like to be poor and black. He is neither, but that doesn't matter because when you have the secret for eradicating poverty, you can project whatever hypotheticals you would like...whether you use poor subjunctive tenses or not. If I were a middle class white man, like Gene Marks, these are more things I would assume of a poor black kid.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2011/12/12/if-i-was-a-poor-black-kid/

If I were a poor black kid and overcame the disproportionate odds of surviving to adulthood, the deteriorating school systems I attend wouldn't even become aware to me until traveling in the back seat of my parents vehicle as we passed nearby lovely nearby neighborhoods that our own barely lay outside of.  I'd be grateful to see the clean cut lawns, windows, and newly designed schools that made mine look slightly better than the half-way house a mile from my own. I would decry congresses' choice to cut taxes on education.  Not because I know my own would be shafted, but because who's going to clean the stained glass windows at Bexley highschool?  I'll never go there, but they're a beau to look at!  Everyone knows education reform is unnecessary because poor communities have the internet and Gene Marks; the bootstraps whereby we can pull ourselves up from instead of crying about poor education, crummy teachers, and the children stuck with them. I would lobby on Capitol Hill with a sign that reads "This poor black boy has bootstraps! No new taxes! Gingrich/Marks for Pres/VEEP!"

If I were a poor black kid, I would realize the welfare system is an umbrella for drug abusers and pushers just as my favorite conservatives retort. I would ask my mother, "Why do we need government subsistence when Gene Marks has shown us resources like Google, momma?" And she would say, "Well I'll be darn't! Jesus done come and sent us a real live angel child! God bless dat man, Mr. Marks!" And then we would share this mysterious google apparition with other poor black kids and eradicate poverty together!

If I was a poor black kid, I'd go to sleep every night dreaming that Sandra Bullock picks me up on the way to school and hones me into a superstar college athlete since I'm too dumb to soar academically by my own merits. I would pray everyday that a middle class white man would write an article about how much better he would be as a poor black kid than myself.  Maybe I would read it 20 years later and realize, "Oh! No wonder I'm such a failure...I didn't utilize google search engines!"  Wait, did I just assume the identity of a poor black boy and call myself a failure?  Must reboot.  Self deprecation will not be tolerated!

If I were a poor black boy, I would pick up my sisters at 10 years old from school to walk them to the library where we would wait for our mother to get off of work everyday. I would sit the three of us down to do our homework, read The Boxcar Children, and then play on the swings behind the library. If on three out of the five school days police officers came to accost us...I mean ask questions about what we were doing, I would know that they are our friends and would not confuse us with other children that sold drugs or threw rocks at the library windows the night before, shattering at least three of them. I would not mind that officers would glare at us in our neighborhood, because they are here to protect us. I would not question why libraries and recreation centers in the suburbs did not have as large a police presence as my community, because I know the primary reason is that the law wants to make sure poor black kids like me are really, really safe. For that reason I would never develop an internalized distrust in the presence of officers, as a poor black kid.

If I were a poor black kid, I would do the taxes for my mother instead of spending the night at my friends house playing video game consoles, and work on my portfolio on weekends instead of imitating the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers and climbing trees. As a poor black kid, working tirelessly from my disposition would be the only thing that matters in life and I would be born with the aptitude to suppress the wanton childish desires for endless mouthfuls of sugar, samurai violence, and elementary crushes.

Ah, good thing I'm a middle class white guy!

Man, I'm done with this

im not religious

and i do not support islam. nor do i support christianity. neither do i support bigotry and prejudice, the two principles that are behind the most recent decision by lowes and other corporations to remove their ads from the "all-american muslim" reality tv show. the threat of letting americans see positive depictions of muslims (outside of the radicals regularly seen on fox news) looms too large, it seems. while lowes did a great job eliminating muslims as their customer base, i think they will find that they have also eliminated a large segment of americans outraged by their spineless bending to a hate group and their bigoted agendas.

Cinco de Mayo, St. Patricks day, and the color of privilege..

Is every holiday an American holiday?

The man with the American flag hanging out of the truck (suspiciously in what seems to be a latino Socal neighborhood) was doing so during the 5th of May . A date Mexico overcame the forces of Napoleon over 100 years ago.

AZ is a hotbed of volatile racial subjects these days, so I'd rather focus less on the physical confrontation between the people involved and more on the verbal altercation. Particularly the "go back to Mexico" that was repeated over and over while dismissing that the minority is an American citizen. Which first, I deem racist and secondly, passively addresses the huge amount of privilege that the SB 1070 endorses. That because you are not white, you are not a "true" American or at least a suspect American. That illegal immigrants are a monolith. There is only one kind.

To look less racist, conservatives say that they don't mind immigrants being here, they just don't want them to be here illegally. But there are hardly inquiries into the immigration status of these individuals. No. It is "shoot first, ask later". It's because after everything is sugar coated and glossed over, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter if you were born here or not, it doesn't matter if they are here illegally or legally, it just matters that they're here and they want them to "go back".

On St. Patty's day, in the midst of the immigration debate, I don't see people parading around with American flags and telling Irish immigrants to go back to Ireland. I guess that's the luck of the Irish...

politicians are people too...honest

"i just donated 750 gifts to needy children, how many of you can say you did that?" declares Californian Representative Elton Gallegly to a crowd of people lobbying for job creation.

The audacity to make gaudy remarks as to how many gifts you can afford to donate is mind boggling. It is the equivalent of kindergarteners bickering over who gets the most number of rainbow stickers.

Share your narcissism with the rest of your ilk. You are speaking to people who are out of jobs, poor, and looking for hope. I can't imagine what would possess someone to scoff at those who they can afford to give more than.

How out of touch are politicians with everyday Americans?

When babies come in blue...

Few things get to me as strongly as those that show oversights on attitudes about race, culture, and privilege. So when I read an article that was published in 2007 about a woman of Scandinavian descent who's moping about how her European-Indian daughter is tipping the social status scale on the wrong side for her lifestyle, it really gets my blood coursing.

Lowri Turner, who I am assuming is a freelance journalist, coo's to the tune of colorblindness until she discovers that her infant has blue eyes that will not stay blue for very long. Or that her dark curly hair will not turn silky, wavy, blonde, like everyone else in her "positively" Scandinavian family. Her second husband was of eastern Indian descent, and through the course of the article, she seems nothing short of being partial to damning him for not having blue eyes, blonde hair, and white skin himself. Indeed, it must have been shocking to give birth to a child who has a darker skin tone than her own, who she expresses "looks nothing like me", who by her own admission will cause her social status relegated to a "'Tracy Towerblocks' living on benefits, most of which they spend on lager and fags" by strangers and peers, who was (above all things) fathered by a man of color. Her mixed race daughter causes her to lose all hope of ever projecting a healthy, stable, European family stating "If I wanted to pass us off as a nice, neat nuclear family, she would blow my cover at once." A nice aryan prop would do the trick though, wouldn't it? Or maybe you can lock her in the basement so you can attend events and outings with the two sons that look just like you. You know, the two from your prior marriage? Perhaps this idea you have in your head of a "nice, neat nuclear family" was already skewed before you decided your daughter was a terrible backdrop for the wholesome family image you wanted to create.

She goes on in this article to lament about having to create an environment for the Indian culture that her daughter should naturally be every bit as much apart of as her own Scandinavian side.

"Part of me thinks I should be playing sitar music to her in her cot, mastering pakoras, and serving them dressed in sari, but that would be fantastically fake coming from me." In other words, whitewashing her daughters cultural ties would be totally not-fake, or so I'm assuming. In fact, any culture outside of the "positively" Scandinavian corner of the world Lowri lives in must be a dangerous haven of heathen gods whose names are spelled too funny to pronounce and who wear even funnier clothing.

So her own daughter is relegating Lowri to a social status that is implied she had no problem relegating other white women to with children of color. She's become the iconoclast of the traditional Scandinavian families. And she can't be bothered divulging in the child's other half of ethnic culture because it's too awkward and far easier to just erase and forget about half of her ethnic identity all together.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-467787/I-love-mixed-race-baby--does-feel-alien.html#ixzz1UBgLTd3E


The most important thing that I believe this article points out is a grim and sneaking suspicion that privilege is something that comes only to her ideal blonde haired, blue eyed baby. She may not realize it, but these confessions are her own prejudice and racist ideas that are being imposed not only onto and into her daughter, but many other children, teenagers, and adults who don't have blue eyes or blonde hair. It is truly disenfranchising. Hopefully she can empower her child to have confidence in her identity, her culture, and her self-esteem. I would love to see an article update on what attitude changes have been made for the better or the worse of her family since 4-5 years ago.

The Throne

It's official.

Jay-Z and Kanye are making babies. And the two begat a name that will be equally as fitting.

With their single "Otis" that dropped, however, I don't feel like they did Redding any honors.

Just a taste of what's to come on the album? Hopefully.

So, noticed Drake talks about taking the "Throne" in DJ Khaleds single. Kanye seems to retaliate in his first verse about "niggas" talking "real reckless". Scales leaning in Ye's favor, lol.