Coleman Hughes, Black Lives Matter
 

Since there has been a fair amount of discussion in General Talk lately about racism in poetry, art, and society in general, including the interesting thread about the Rita Dove poem, I thought people may like this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxLJCXKT8MQ

By the way, I found Coleman's podcasts, which I have started listening to.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas...n/id1489326460

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Khalil+Gibran+Muhammad&ru=%2fvideos%2fsea rch%3fq%3dKhalil%2bGibran%2bMuhammad%26FORM%3dHDRS C3&view=detail&mid=237837AE83349A8F629A237837AE833 49A8F629A&&FORM=VDRVSR

Mr. Elster:

I am hesitant to bring this back to the top because I think Mr. Novick's thread on the current actions of Trump is vastly more important. But I'm doing it anyway.

Coleman Hughes is impressive. Rational argument based on data seems to be his touchstone.

I do not believe in 'reparations'. I do not believe in defunding the police.
But I am an angry old black man who is concerned by the over one-hundred-year-old concerted effort by America to create a link between criminality and the black race.

Bill

Hi Bill. I respect your feelings about having lived through and experiencing some unfortunate and unsettling American history, and it's also interesting about what Khalil Gibran Mohammad says about big data. But have you listened to this podcast? Coleman Hughes gets into much more detail about his views. I think it's worth listening to. At least I found it informative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt95ct2gISA

Martin

Martin:

I will indeed listen to Mr. Hughes podcast.

On the other hand, read Mr. Muhammed's book "The Condemnation of Blackness" it is the most extended & enlightening account of the accusation of racism directed against the criminal justice system.

Bill

I think you would enjoy Coleman's podcast, Bill.

I'll check out The Condemnation of Blackness. I read the blurb about it and it sounds like a truly fascinating read. In my opinion, it's unfortunate that we still, in 2020, put so much emphasis on the pigmentation of a person's skin, instead of looking at the whole person.

It is similar (more or less) to judging someone solely by their hair color. Perhaps one day, skin color (due to UV rays from the sun) will be no more important than whether a person has blond hair, red hair, or brunette hair. Perhaps that will happen a hundred years from now, or maybe never. Who knows?

Martin, while hair color may be irrelevant to how American men of European descent get treated by others, the same is not true for women--mostly because American men of European descent have been culturally encouraged to decide that they have a "type" of woman that meets their personal specifications, and hair color is often the primary identifying characteristic of that "type." (And doesn't a stated preference for blondes or redheads or brunettes strongly imply a preference for white women?)

Also, haters don't just hate skin color. They hate all the other physical signifiers of difference--facial features, hair texture, etc.--that tend to accompany differences in skin color, because they regard these as symbols of the cultural, political, religious, and economic gulfs between their own group and other groups.

Good points, Julie. I agree with you about the "haters." It's too bad that, on this tiny blue dot of a planet in the infinite vastness of space-time, there have been people all throughout history and now who feel they must hate. Can we not learn to get along? That's just a question.

As far as hair color goes, I read, a year or two ago, that a survey indicated that men, on average, actually prefer brunettes. I recently read that women with lighter skin are considered healthier, because of the fact that light skin absorbs more sunlight and therefore produces more vitamin D, which helps make their milk more nutritious for the infant. On the other hand, light-skinned men are considered unhealthy.

All through human history, some people have put a great deal of importance on skin pigmentation, either in positive or negative ways. Did you know, by the way, that all babies are born with pale skin? Another thing I learned is that there is no genetic basis for dividing humanity into races. "Race" is a purely social construct.

Here’s a thought experiment:

There are people, for instance a black man married to a white woman with mixed children, one black, one blond and blue-eyed. He doesn’t quite fit into the black community or the “white” community. When a cop pulls that man over, he probably expects that black man to behave like a black man. Should this man, who is an individual, try to behave as if he were “black” or should he behave like himself? Should he try to talk with a typical African American accent, or talk like he normally talks?

Why do so many people think in a black/white way, when there are so many groups of people in this country (America) of every kind: Asian, Jew, Catholic, Irish, Indian, etc. And if you are a member of one of these groups, does that mean you have to look and act like other members of “your group”?

Added in: After I wrote the above, I accidentally found and listened to this short video, which got me thinking and learning a bit more about Woke, which I haven't thought about much at all before (because I only recently got slightly more interested in social and political issues). I just read something (from Wikipedia) about Murray, so I'll take his comments in this video with a grain of salt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0eg_q8fCmA

Martin, maybe take some time and do the reading and investment required to really even begin to understand a tiny bit the experience of black persons in the US before opening your class. We (people of the color we don't see as color) have a shit ton more listening to do and even a few months into some of that listening your post above will make you cringe. I am sure someone on here could give you a great reading list to start with. Maybe you already have one. But I think it is time to listen for us and these thought experiments from Mayberry are premature.

Some good questioning of Coleman Hughes' suggestions can be found at the link below. Don't know much about the writer and his title is certainly polarizing but the entire piece is a good starting point for examing what might be obscured by the work of Hughes which is unsurprisingly lauded by the intellectual dark webbings.

https://alexsheremet.com/coleman-hug...ot-be-trusted/

Coleman Hughes & BLM
 

Martin:

Your “Can we not learn to get along” and all your references to the “emphasis” on skin pigmentation sound simplistic, shallow and rather insincere.

“Race is a purely social construct”.
It has also been a political construct and a scientific eugenic construct.
Whatever construct it takes has meant bad news for some group of people.

To be honest, I really have only a passing interest in Coleman Hughes and Kahlil Gibran Mohammed or even who’s President of this country.
Some are a lot more dangerous than others.

I didn’t need the death of George Floyd to tell me that in every since of the word "matter",
a black life in America has never held the same value as a white life.
A reparation check would have the same significance to me as a stimulus check. I’d spend it and forget about it.
Unless I'm asked for my vote, I have no say in what this country thinks it owes me.

I spend part of every day with my own racist thoughts and am only serious about reforming some of them.
My main interest is trying to get what’s in my head down into a poem.
It doesn’t feel remotely like a social contract and I am absolutely selfish about it.
Currently, the only helpful images I have to get there are Emily Dickenson alone in her room and Sonny Rollins alone atop the Brooklyn Bridge.

Bill

[Cross-posted with Andrew M. and Bill]

Martin, I'm far more interested in "what is" than "what if." Talking about hypothetical situations is not as enlightening as listening to actual lived experience.

I am white. My husband is American-born Chinese. One of our daughters is very dark-skinned, and she jokes that her features look as if I made no genetic contribution to her whatsoever, except that her hair is dark brown instead of black. Our other daughter has skin even paler than mine, but her eyes look East Asian enough that she can't pass for white.

I look very different from my daughters, and when they were young, other white moms we encountered in suburban parks often asked me one of these three questions, before introducing themselves:

1. "Are you the nanny?"
2. "Are you their REAL mom, or are they adopted?"
3. "They're beautiful! Where did you get them/From what country did you adopt them?"

The fact that so many felt they needed to know these things, before proceeding to any other sort of social niceties, suggests that since they couldn't size up our family's social status at a glance, their number one priority was to gather more information before deciding how friendly they wanted to be with me.

This wasn't racism. It was classism. Many college-educated moms are insecure about the social status they lose when society sees them only as someone's mom, rather than as someone in a prestigious, high-paying career. I experienced this myself, and it was a real identity crisis for me, but some other women took it to the point of a horror of mistakenly treating someone else's hired help as their own peer.

Classism also recognizes that there is social capital for white families to gain when they engage with non-whites, because it might later be trotted out as useful proof that they are not racist. I often suspected that these moms were pumping me for details to include in a subsequent report to their real friends, about how nicely their children had made friends with children who were not 100% white, and what that implied about the niceness of these white moms themselves.

In the vast majority of our interactions in parks, nobody cared about race enough to mention it, and the kids and moms and nannies just enjoyed each other's company. But if things had started with one of those three questions, things were going to remain little awkwardly self-conscious and how-do-I-look between the adults for the whole time.

Changing topic a bit:

When out in public, our light-skinned daughter is frequently approached by East Asian women and asked what product she is using to lighten her skin. Light skin, especially in women, has long been associated with high social class in many Asian and European cultures. Think of the hats and gloves and long sleeves that fashionable European and American men and women used to wear, either to avoid tanning or to avoid showing it. Also think of the more recent pejorative terms "redneck" and "farmer tan," which connote a man of low social class. Only in the 20th century did a suntan become associated with the financial means to indulge in outdoor leisure activities; before that, tanned or sunburned skin tended to be associated with not having the financial means to escape menial labor in the fields.

Again, a lot of society's racial attitudes are actually class attitudes. We are social animals, and we rely on stereotypes to assess our relative positions in the pecking order as quickly as possible. Since accusations of racism (or even just implicit bias) can cause white people to lose social status quickly, it is understandable that many, many white people are anxious to avoid all suspicion of that. But some go so far to proclaim themselves racism-free that they actually say that if Black and brown people would just stop bringing up race and accusing the nice white majority of bias, we would all live in peace and harmony and mutual goodwill. Sam Harris said something along those lines in the video you pointed to recently, and it struck me as a particularly naïve, head-in-the-sand, self-exonerating attitude. It is a flat denial both that significant injustice exists, and that white people have any obligation to surrender the advantages that they may have unknowingly been enjoying at others' expense. Harris made a point of saying that more white people than Black people are victims of police brutality, but he neglected any mention the fact that most people of any race who become victims of police brutality (outside of protests) have tended to come from social classes with few resources, whom the police feel they can push around with impunity. It seems hugely relevant that a higher percentage of Black people than white people are trapped in similarly vulnerable social classes. Harris ignored this completely. He instead asked why the Black Lives Matter activists weren't advocating for those white victims, or making songs to remember their names, and he implied that this was very, very unfair of them--as if the BLM activists are the ones guilty of racism, not the white majority. This is ridiculous. One could as well ask why Sam Harris wasn't advocating for those white victims, and couldn't be bothered to use his platform to publicize their names. And I think the answer is that the social class gulf between him and those white victims keeps him from empathizing with them, or worrying that what happens to a poor white drunk of below-average intelligence might happen to him.

White communities have long enjoyed the social, political, and economic benefits of excluding non-whites from opportunities to compete in business and to acquire the kind of property that builds intergenerational wealth. Those disparities will not miraculously vanish if Black and brown people just stop talking about them. Or if the white majority stays focused on hypothetical intellectual exercises, rather than listening to firsthand testimony about lived reality.

I learned through reading labor history that the term “redneck” originated during coal miner strikes in W. Virginia. The striking miners would wear red bandanas around their necks to show solidarity.

You mentioned earlier Julie that it is a white European male thing to like women based on hair color. Hair color does vary more among people from more northern regions. Makes sense. Does that mean men from areas where hair colors vary less don’t have other things they find more alluring than others? Isn’t it true that women have traits they find more alluring than others?

I’ve been aware I live in a place where white supremacy is the dominant evil since I was a small child. I was dirt poor from a totally screwed family and am still, at sixty-five, always aware how I don’t fit here, especially here, and other places because of the not having the opportunities so many take for granted. I am also aware, and have been my entire life, that being African American or Native American would have made my situation immeasurably worse. I know about classicism and if I didn’t I’d learn it at the Sphere. I also think some of the sample slicing going on these days is getting mighty thin. There are major brutish, cruel forces in America and elsewhere today and maybe slamming men because they like a certain hair color is not the best place to focus outrage? Here in my city poor, predominantly African American, families are facing evictions and the same old racists are spewing the same shit about self-sufficiency, although the minimum wage jobs these families depend on have gone away. It isn’t a problem that needs a poet’s subtlety.

Best

Here's what one dictionary says, which supports an association with skin color, even if (as you contend, and which I see no reason to reject) it might not have started with one:

red·neck
/ˈredˌnek/
INFORMAL•DEROGATORY
noun: redneck; plural noun: rednecks
a working-class white person, especially a politically reactionary one from a rural area.
"rednecks in the high, cheap seats stomped their feet and hooted"
Similar:
provincial, bumpkin, country bumpkin, yokel, rustic, country dweller, peasant, country cousin, reactionary, conservative, hayseed, hick, hillbilly, rube, apple-knocker
Origin
mid 19th century: from the idea of the back of the neck being sunburned from outdoor work.

I didn't intend to slam men, or to imply that women don't have similarly arbitrary preferences about what they find attractive. I just meant to question the accuracy of Martin's assumption that hair color is a complete non-factor in humans' decisions about how to treat each other.

For the record, my husband says he initially was only interested in my legs and tits. How enlightened of him.

If some of my statements seem naive, that’s likely due to the fact that I have never been very interested in politics. It’s actually General Talk here at Eratosphere that got me a bit more interested. So then I started listening to random videos and podcasts about the things going on these days, and I especially learned things from people like Coleman Hughes, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury (having also heard John and Glenn together in discussions), Sam Harris, and others.

I find these topics interesting, but I still would rather just write poems. I rarely listen to the news. I enjoy hearing and reading ideas from more knowledgeable folks than me and getting a balanced view of things rather than getting emotional about sensational and often one-sided news items. For many years I composed lots of music and performed music, but lately, it’s mostly poetry. I also like science, so tend to view worldly issues in a scientific way.

By the way, I have lived in many kinds of neighborhoods. For the last few years, I’ve been living in a very mixed neighborhood, predominantly African American. So I don’t think I’m totally isolated from the world, except for now during this pandemic!

Bill, Julie, Andrew, and John - thanks for your thoughts and comments, which I am reading through and enjoying the discussion. I haven’t finished reading your Post #12, Julie, but I’ll get to it. All of your thoughts are thought-provoking and broadening my views.

Around a half year ago I acquired an old, used book entitled Evolving Life Styles: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology by Elbert W. Stewart. I found it quite fascinating.

Yes skin pigmentation is a result of proximity to the equator and race is a social construct. There are also strong theories about why societies world-wide probably developed east-west/west-east than south-north, having to do with constancy of climate and many other environmental realities. Race is stupid, surely not the human race at its best. But right now, in the Western World, race matters immensely. No matter how far we may feel progressed from race personally, we still live in a world where black kids are serving four times the amount of prison time for the same amount of drugs. We live in a society in which people go to prison at all for drugs because of racist drug laws. We live in a society in which having a “black-sounding name” on your resume lessens one’s chance of getting a job. Trump right now is trying to roll back rules put in place to end red-lining and other discrimination in housing to appeal to white people. We live in a society where a white congressman feels free to accost a woman of PR descent, who is also dutifully elected, and call her a “fucking bitch.” Do you think he would have done that to a white woman?

The list goes on and on. So, bottom line, our ideas or awareness of the racism of race, don’t matter a whole lot. And yes, skin color makes a bigger difference than hair color. Sheesh.

I didn't intend to slam men, or to imply that women don't have similarly arbitrary preferences about what they find attractive. I just meant to question the accuracy of Martin's assumption that hair color is a complete non-factor in humans' decisions about how to treat each other.

Julie - I didn’t quite mean to suggest that hair color isn’t a factor in people’s behavior toward each other. Just that it’s not a factor in who is admitted into Harvard. Does anyone care how many blonds went to Harvard or Yale last year? But, as female birds find the coloring of male birds attractive or unattractive, so people may do the same with each others’ hair color or style and other physical attributes, like height or shape or age — or the brands and colors of clothing they happen to wear.

The "war on drugs" is stupid and has never been proven to work.

Yesterday I was listening to this talk between Coleman Hughes and John Pfaff about that very topic (the criminal justice system). I haven't listened yet to the whole video, but plan to do so later today.

Deadly And Dangerous Prison Conditions | John Pfaff (Ep.6)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuHq_Y_xlt4

Martin
To be at a tangent from the conversation, regarding your point that you have started reading and watching more black thinkers.
Being mixed race I make sure to read a wide variety of poets, though someone's race should never be a reason for their reading habits. Here are a few suggestions, if you're interested, these are less political than poetic, but they still might be fun to read, no matter how unrelated to the present point.

Jay Wright
Vahni Capildeo
Derek Walcott
Edward Kamau Brathwaite
"Scavella" (pffa)
Robert Hayden
Lucille Clifton
Jay Bernard

I'm sure you have heard of a few, so sorry if this seems patronising. I've tried to avoid obvious mentions like Nikki Giovani, and Maya Angelou, both of whose poetry I do not care for.

Hope this helps.

One of the things I consciously thought about when I had my daughter was that as much as possible I was going to let her and her generation decide for themselves how they came to grips with race. I did not want to bombard her constantly like my parents did with us about stories of Jim Crow America.

It was not until my daugher's generation that you could safely refer to yourself as 'mixed'. In my generation calling yourself 'mixed' was evidence that you were ashamed to be black or were tryng to pass. I spent a year at an all black Universtiy in Prarie View, Texas in the early 70's. Knowing better I embarked on an explanation of my heritage to a brother and he said, 'Cut it, man...you black". America was under the same domination of the 'one drop rule' as apartheid South Africa.

My daughter in junior high once asked me what box she should check on a form when it came to enquire about race and I said "Oh Hell, check them all.

Bill


Bill

I like that, Bill. I think that was clever. I'm curious now your daughter is doing now and how she gets along in the world.

Julie - I enjoyed reading about your encounters with other moms in the park. And I agree that it's classism. I think you and Bill would enjoy this video, which I recently listened to. It's with Coleman Hughes (again) and another fella. I can't remember his name now. They talk about many interesting things happening in America lately and their opinions about them. I think Coleman has a brilliant mind and is very well-read for such a young guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAZogp2_pZ8&t=322s

Here is something from Wikipedia about John McWhorter’s views:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McWhorter

If you’re interested, you could investigate his opinions more yourselves rather than me attempting (awkwardly) to summarize those points. But all I want to say is, they make sense to me.

C'mon Martin.

This is not a forum where I would take unlimited liberties with my daughter's privacy, behind her back. She don't know you. It ain't even all that friendly around here.

Go search out more Coleman Hughes videos.

Bill

No worries, Bill. I was just wondering, that's all. Sorry. :o

Hi Cameron,

Thanks for that list of poets. I've read a few of them, but definitely not all, so now I have plenty to read. Thanks again.

Martin