A Political Rant, Mostly About the USA Scene

It's a very sunny day and fortunately not as nearly a hot a day as one of two hellish ones in the past week. After deliberating on how to navigate the U-Bahn on the way to university on those days, I ended up merely staying at home. Barack Obama, of course, had no such luck; his visit coincided with the first of these days, so he got to enjoy the 34°-in-the-shade mark as well as the humidity which had mounted for the past week or so beforehand. Since the speech was held before a preselected audience I didn't go hear it, and besides the anticipation was much greater in 2008, so I contented myself with watching the news coverage.

In the past week I read two or three romance novels online, translated from English into the Portuguese. After a while it was clear that they were homemade translations, so the English syntax and idiom was intact and probably confusing for a Portuguese reader. But it seemed more important to learn the vocabulary than any grammatical idiosyncracies, so I copied-and-pasted much of the books into Google Translate and inched through them. This pace was only really a bit disturbing when I encountered a prolonged childbirth scene; in the English original I would have sped through it, but in this particular situation little was left for me to do but to slog through it bit by bit and end up feeling pretty queasy despite holding the general conviction that it is shallow to be bothered by the miracle of existence etc. At the end of the days I almost felt as if I could write in Portuguese mas acho que é melhor não ter muita temeridade and por isso I usei Translate to check, which is a very good idea because my first attempt at a sentence was mostly Spanish with incorrect Italian thrown in.

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After that preoccupation ended, I finally had the time and inclination to catch up with the American news again, which is even more of a circus than anywhere else so there are always good tidbits to be found. This time what occupied my thoughts most was the news of the iffy racial philosophy of a Food Network television chef, in her deposition for a court case in which she and her brother are accused of creating a terrible work environment.

For one thing, since she made a name for herself as a 'Southern' style cook, and some of her supporters are trying to excuse her peccadilloes on the grounds that she grew up in a time and a place where the 'N' word isn't so uncommon, I'm probably not the only one who sees broader ramifications regarding the centuries-long cross-Dixie squabble. For one thing, in a sense much of the outrage which Southerners expend in internet comments (Gawker and elsewhere) on arguing that Yankees mischaracterize and exaggerate the quantity and quality of racism in the South, is being temporarily forgotten; this tradition of racism — much denied — is suddenly being reclaimed from the historical ether.



On one level this is not a political event, especially since the chef is (as it is bruited) a registered Democrat who voted for Obama twice. But as far as I can tell from a pan-Atlantic armchair, it very much is political on many levels. Even aside from the North/South, Coast/Midwest divide in voting patterns and liberality of opinion, I think it encapsulates the way in which African Americans are still treated — consciously, unconsciously, politically, and personally. Very little which I have heard about the approach to supposedly specifically African American issues — poverty, high crime, single-parent families, teenage pregnancy, welfare reception, etc. — has firstly avoided racial stereotyping and secondly admitted continuous race-based limitations imposed by the mostly-white establishment. Except if 'Liberals,' who are supposed to be in the minority, are the ones who are discussing the matter. If people continue to deny even that the effects of historical racism still exist — and I didn't need to go to a hostel in Brooklyn to figure out that ghettoization, etc., does — there is little hope of confronting active racism.

Considering the notoriously widening American income gap between the rich and poor, of course one could say that the financial limitations imposed by this establishment on the poor is even worse for African Americans than straight-out racism, but I think that old-fashioned bigotry is still being undeservedly ignored. Figures that 'white' and African Americans use drugs to the same degree but that African Americans are far more likely to be incarcerated for it, and a federal judge's recent pronouncement that African- and Latino-Americans are 'predisposed to crime,' are only two things I've read to support this view.

Anyway, the reason why I'm on an anti-racism 'kick' is that I finally finished Black Like Me and did a bit of peripheral reading (largely on Wikipedia (c: ) which brought back some of the things I read for my Moorish Science Temple essay. Besides one has the very uneasy feeling that there are things in one's own society which one overlooks just as much as an Alabamian in the 70s or a Michigander nowadays might overlook racial discrimination.

The other thing which disturbs me about current events — to name only one thing — is the way in which the protests in Turkey are being handled. The two severe injuries I've heard of from tear gas canisters, and the footage of people being thrown into the air by water cannons, seem like a pathologically exaggerated response to protests which as far as I've seen are nothing like the ones in Egypt's Tahrir Square in its violent stages or even at the average G7 or G8 summit. On the other hand, the newly revived German opposition to Turkey entering the EU on the grounds of that is such a transparent bit of opportunism — an excuse to cloak justified concerns about Turkey's membership which are not diplomatic if one expresses them openly, and to cloak the unadmirable impulses of national and perhaps racial supremacism which in my summation of matters really lie at the heart of this opposition — that it, in my opinion, hardly deserves to be dignified by any response.

On the other hand, I should think that Turkey would be glad to be quit of the EU considering how it is being presently run, as a pseudomoral pseudobenevolent empire of common financial interests, with an underpinning of sober and worthy stuff which meets with opposition even in the isolationist nooks of Britain's Parliament. Considering even small embarrassments like the song and dance against gay marriage in France, for instance, I think that the claimed liberality, justice, plurality and generosity of European ideal are in severe and general need of reappreciation. — Physician, heal thyself.