Monday, May 10, 2010

Black Codes in Brown

Damn. Should I be showing up on the daily to support the hunger strikers in front of California Hall who are protesting the Arizona law and demanding that University of California take a stance on it and acknowledge the connection it has to who gets laid off from the job? I always forget that I can't just represent myself in a rarefied antiblack environment like academia. I represent probably 25 or 30 thousand niggas. In fact, I go up every day because I keep hearing black people around here talking about dropping out, talking about not feeling like their work in academia is "doing" anything. So, as the percentage of black people goes down, those of us who remain are left to take the heat for what more and more black people say and do. Time was when I was just three fifths-- now I'm damn near 33,000-- oops, there goes another-- 35,000.



"We could all be Latino"-- "What makes someone profilable?"

"Employers choose the people whom they will pay the least."

"How do we work together?"

"'We did this [civil rights activism] and we don't want you getting none of ours.'"

Hm. Nobody is really asking what "Latino" means, and what "black" means. If Jared Sexton's Amalgamation Schemes is to be believed, "Latino" is essentially an antiblack container of various phenotypic blends of settlers, Indians, and slaves.

"Forge alliances"

"In Mexico we're very racist. People of dark color... are not considered as good as white."
This is very helpful to hear from one of the Latina panelists, and it confirms Tanya Hernandez's observations in an insightful 2007 column in the LA Times.

"The whole creation of whiteness...the idea of whiteness was created to justify slavery."
hmm... we need to split certain hairs here