Hey white people...its on us!

Last night I went on twitter when the Zimmerman verdict was announced...at least until I read the words of a father wondering WTH he was going to say to his black son. Then I started balling and the evening was basically over for me.

Surely every parent of a black child in this country has to grapple with teaching them some form of the Black Male Code. I remember the profound sense of what white privilege means hit me when one of my co-workers talked about how she had to make her son cut off his dreads when he was 13 so as not to make him a target. What mother of a white child has to think about those kinds of things? And what mother of a white child has to fear for their lives when they're walking home from the store?

It looks to me like no perfect calculation of the Black Male Code could have saved Trayvon. That's where we hit a brick wall. This is just no country for young black men. The randomness of these incidents is where the fear lurks.

What it all comes down to is that this is not a "black people's problem" - even as it is their children's lives at stake. Surely they will do everything they can to protect them. But the sad thing is that these kinds of things won't stop happening until white people get their shit together. That realization sent me back to something my friend Robinswing wrote years ago: We Can't Fix Ya!

The blackwoman has been thinking it might be time to seek out some solutions for eliminating racism. A more difficult project than I imagined.

I have come to one conclusion.

Race is a problem for white people to solve. If black people or brown people could have made racism go away it would have long since disappeared back into the nothing-ness from which it came.

Nah, it’s on white folks to make the necessary moves to kill and bury, once and for all, the notion of race.

Perhaps a good place to start is to listen to black people talk about what it means to be a parent these days.  And keep your g-d mouth shut when it comes to advice - even when what they have to say makes you uncomfortable. Right now they feel like their children's lives are at stake - with good reason. Can we find a touch of empathy to spur some curiosity about what that might feel like as a parent?

That's what its going to take, folks. As overwhelming as it might seem, every time a white person opens themselves up to that reality we get one step closer to ending days like this. If we're ever going to get there - its on us.

Best Snowden/Greenwald/Assange Analogies: We Report...You Decide (updated)

Hanging out on twitter I noticed a trend. Lots of people are coming up with analogies for the happenings in the Snowden/Greenwald/Assange affairs over the last couple of days (here's the latest in case you missed it). I thought it would be fun to compile some of them - for posterity sake of course :-)

So who decides whether Snowden's intel-bomb goes off -- random citizen in Gotham City?
— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) July 13, 2013

@Keethers these guys want that moment with Marlo from The Wire..they don't want that moment....it only gonna go one way, not to their liking
— Arrogant Demon (@ArrogantDemon) July 13, 2013

Greenwald has gone 1940s mob movie: "Don't nobody move, see, or the United States gets it."
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) July 13, 2013

The Snowden story gets odder by the minute: not just reminiscent of Cold War spy stories, it now has its own MAD dynamic.
— Jeremy Duns (@jeremyduns) July 13, 2013

Man, those comparisons of GG and Snowden to Pinky and the Brain turned out to be quite prophetic.
— eclecticbrotha (@eclecticbrotha) July 13, 2013

Wikileaks has played everyone in this. It wasn't Tattaglia, it was Barzini all along. #Snowden Asylum Plea in #Russia http://t.co/bIqInz4UtQ
— Tom Nichols (@TheWarRoom_Tom) July 12, 2013

So which one works best for you?

UPDATE: I'm going to add one of my own.

I'll leave it for you to decide who is Natasha and who is Boris.

How does a national party die?

Coming out of the 2012 elections there were a lot of questions about what the Republican Party would do in response to their massive losses. Would they regroup or would they continue to cling to the dying beast of privileged white male patriarchy? I think we can safely say that those questions have been answered.

So far they've gone against the wishes of over 90% of Americans to defeat gun background checks, tried to eliminate food stamps, and defeated the attempt to keep interest rates low on student loans. Next week they'll hold their 38th vote in the House to try to kill Obamacare  and the crown jewel in their hostage note on raising the debt ceiling involves privatizing Medicare.

Meanwhile state GOP parties are doing their best to alienate women by stripping them of their rights to reproductive health care and doing their best to suppress the rights of people to vote.

Coming in to all this most people thought the bell weather of whether or not there was a shred of sanity left in the Republican Party would be their position on immigration reform. And we all knew that rested primarily on the shoulders of House Speaker Boehner. Would he be willing to stand up to the lunatic caucus in the House and work with the bi-partisan bill passed in the Senate? This week he said "no."

I rarely find myself agreeing with Kathleen Parker. But today I do.

Republicans seem to be adopting the self-immolation tactics of principled martyrs.

Of course, principled or not, you’re still dead in the end...

Before you can govern, you have to win. And before you can win, you have to offer something people want to buy.

What Republicans are selling appeals to an ever-diminishing market that doesn’t even include their erstwhile allies in business and industry. And their self-immolation may prove to have been nothing more than a bonfire of vanities.

It seems to me that the only remaining question now is: "What does the death of a national party look like?"

The truth is - we haven't witnessed that in modern times in this country. What we've seen is a shift between parties in response to the Southern Strategy. And when Democrats were on the brink of a challenge to their sustainability in the 70's and 80's, they regrouped and survived. Of course that was aided by a 1984 electoral college map that looked like this:

That's not likely to happen again.

I don't think anyone knows how this plays out. The one thing I can guarantee is that it will take some time. And as we can see, while its happening things are going to get really ugly. 

Think about that when you want to despair about how crazy our politics seem these days. What we are witnessing isn't like anything we've ever seen before. We are watching a national party go off the rails - hell bent on its own destruction. Any attempt to lay this at the feet of a President who has done nothing but reach out in attempts to find common ground is nothing short of nuts. 

The only way we ultimately lose on this one is if we let the ugly and the darkness from which it springs overtake us. What we need is resolve...the kind that keeps us shinning our collective little lights no matter what.

Two speeches...one hero

Today two people stood on the world stage to speak their minds. The contrast was stark. One was Edward Snowden and the other Malala Yousafzai. In the the short 16 years of her life, the latter has been the only one of the two to demonstrate real heroism.

From the time she was only 11 years old, Malala has been speaking up for herself and others against violence and repression. Last year she was shot in the face and neck for doing so.

You can listen to Malala's speech here. Anyone who is paying attention knows that this young woman is a true hero and that she is going to change the world. 

Who you gonna trust?

I wrote earlier today about how the Republicans are trying to make hay out of their inability to "trust" President Obama on immigration reform because he delayed implementation of the employer mandate in Obamacare.

That's an interesting strategy coming from the same folks who refuse to comply with the law themselves. Just a couple of months ago Boehner and McConnell wrote a letter to the President saying that they refuse to submit recommendations for membership to the Independent Payment Advisory Board - something Obamacare requires them to do.

I remember at the time thinking to myself, "Can Congress simply refuse to do something the law requires them to do?" If so, that's a pretty BFD!

Anyway, now that they're so busy criticizing President Obama about the mandate delay, what I'm thinking is, "Can you spell p.r.o.j.e.c.t.i.o.n?"

America gets a wake-up call

Following the election of Barack Obama in 2008, there were many who suggested that the United States had finally entered a "post-racial" phase. And then after he won re-election in 2012, there was talk about the Republican Party reforming and reaching out to people of color.

We now know that both of those assumptions were incorrect.

If you had any doubts about that, take a look at what happened when House Republicans met this week to discuss what to do about immigration reform.

Much of the opposition that tea party members voiced in Wednesday's meeting goes deeper than a policy difference about a pathway to citizenship, and comes down to an issue of trust. Many Republicans continue to reject the basic legitimacy of the Obama presidency, and they don't trust the president to faithfully carry out laws designed to secure the border, with some pointing to the president's decision to delay implementation of an element of Obamacare until 2015.

"I made a comment in there, kind of offhand, that trusting Barack Obama with border security is like trusting my daughter with Bill Clinton," Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) said. "We just don't trust him."

I'm not sure how they can make it any clearer - that final quote being one of the ugliest statements ever made by an elected official.

Commenting on this issue of not trusting President Obama to carry out aspects of the immigration reform bill, even David Brooks demonstrates that he understands exactly where things stand.

...at some point, this argument just becomes an excuse to oppose every piece of legislation, ever. All legislation allows the executive branch to have some discretion. It’s always possible to imagine ways in which a law may be distorted in violation of its intent. But if you are going to use that logic to oppose something, you are going to end up opposing tax reform, welfare reform, the Civil Rights Act and everything else...

Whether this bill passes or not, this country is heading toward a multiethnic future. Republicans can either shape that future in a conservative direction or, as I’ve tried to argue, they can become the receding roar of a white America that is never coming back.

That’s what’s at stake.

Yep. That pretty well sums up the "logic" of the Republican Party today. The President a majority of the American people elected...twice...happens to be black. Ergo, he is illegitimate. Therefore we will refuse to govern.

This is our moment to decide whether or not we are going to let that happen...whether we'll pass or fail this next step in our long slow struggle with this country's original sin of slavery and racism. I'd suggest that the turning point just might be the 2014 election. Typically a lot of people sit the midterms out. If we do that this time, we'll be giving the Huelskamp's of the world a pass on their racist (not to mention misogynist) agenda.

We're not going to let that happen - right?

The DREAMers are showing us how its done

I've written before about the most successful movement for change that we are witnessing in this country today...the DREAMers. As Tom Hayden said, they are reminiscent of successful movements in our past.

The Dreamers remind me of the Freedom Riders fifty years ago who, deciding they wouldn’t settle for life under Jim Crow, risked jail and racist violence until the Kennedy administration was won to their side, and a political party realignment began. The Dreamers have petitioned, engaged in civil disobedience, lobbied for legislation at state and federal levels, and refused to accept defeats along the way.

So I thought it might be helpful to take a look at what's going on here to see if we can learn some things from them. To start, I'd suggest that everyone go to the web site United We Dream and look around. From their mission statement:

United We Dream is the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the nation, a powerful nonpartisan network made up of 52 affiliate organizations in 25 states. We organize and advocate for the dignity and fair treatment of immigrant youth and families, regardless of immigration status. UWD’s current priority is to win citizenship for the entire undocumented community and end senseless deportations and abuses. We seek to address the inequities and obstacles faced by immigrant youth and believe that by empowering immigrant youth, we can advance the cause of the entire community—justice for all immigrants...

In 2012, we successfully pressured President Obama and won the deferred action policy—providing protection from deportation and work permits for young people without papers—and leading a diverse immigrant rights’ movement in our biggest success in over 25 years. In 2013 and beyond, our network has committed to relentlessly fight for our families and communities and win a roadmap to citizenship and fair treatment for all 11 million undocumented Americans. As we’ve proven, we have the power to redefine what is possible and win.

From this we learn that they are "youth-led" and that they are organized at the local level.  When the DREAM Act failed to pass Congress in 2010 due to Republican obstruction - they took their case directly to President Obama. The path they took is significant. They didn't by-pass Congress, that's where they started. Once they had built up public support for their cause and Congress failed to act, they'd given the President the room he needed to implement unilateral action.

I also think its important to note how specific they are in their goals - in contrast with groups like OWS. First it was the DREAM Act and now its a "roadmap to citizenship and fair treatment for all 11 million undocumented Americans." They have laid out their principles for reform and advocate for them tirelessly.

But what I have found most important is that - as the immigration reform bill has worked its way through the negotiations process - you have NOT heard these young people either give ultimatums (ie, "kill the bill" if it doesn't contain one item on the list) or trash particular politicians for their positions. They seem extremely savvy about the sausage-making process of legislation and have stayed out of those shenanigans. I suspect that in doing so, they've been able to keep their eye on the ball and know that this is a long-term struggle that likely won't get completely solved with one bill.

Following in the footsteps of the late Harvey Milk, the DREAMers have had the courage to "come out of the closet" as undocumented and risk both the legal and social consequences of doing so. Their motto is "Undocumented and Unafraid." That has allowed them to stage effective actions like this to highlight their cause.

And to take it to Congress like this.

I find it fascinating that so many people on the left are mostly ignoring this amazing movement and the young people who are leading it. To me, this is what organizing for change looks like in our country today. When the history books are written, it will be the DREAMers who are credited with winning this battle and all those "keyboard activists" will likely still be yelling at each other on the internet.