August 20, 2012 · 0 Comments
By Ishmael Reed:
Will White Women Turn Their Uteri Over to the Republicans, Again?
“Any Republican vice-presidential candidate is going to be broadly anti-abortion, but Ryan goes much further. He believes ending a pregnancy should be illegal even when it results from rape or incest, or endangers a woman’s health. He was a cosponsor of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, a federal bill defining fertilized eggs as human beings, which, if passed, would criminalize some forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization.”
–Michelle Goldberg, The Daily Beast
On the Sunday after Occupy progressives smashed windows at President Obama’s campaign headquarters, during one of their rampages in downtown Oakland, California, the New York Times Magazine ran a predictably racist piece [1]about the city at one point quoting someone who called Oakland “a black hole.” I stopped reading The New York Times Magazine, which is a throw back to the penny press of the 1830s with its African cannibals and black faces on welfare. I figured that the editors of the Magazine get their inspiration from Julius Streicher, when it comes to blacks.They were even picketed when they ran photos from a photography book entitled “Cocaine True Cocaine Blue,” which showed black crack addicts including one of a prostitute fellating a John with a baby strapped to her back. This even offended black Times editorial writer Brent Staples. He wrote:
“Reading and looking, I couldn’t help wonder: why are nearly all of the people in these photographs black? The vast majority of drug addicts in America are white. This could be said of any phenomenon in the United States, of course, but why is the white aspect of drug addiction so consistently invisible?
“The drugs that flood impoverished neighborhoods certainly don’t originate there. Where are the faces of those who import them, the well-to-do chemists who earn piles of money by turning out the product? Couldn’t Mr. Richards have found a setting where most or at least half of the drug addicts were white? The Hartford Courant did, in ‘Streets of Despair,’ its series two years ago about drug addiction in its city. Courant staff members say that readers were surprised to see that 70 percent of the addicts depicted were white. Bombarded for years with images of black depravity, they had come to believe that drug addiction was a black problem exclusively. I’m not alone in wondering why nearly all Mr. Richards’s addicts are black. African-Americans in New York were incensed when some of these pictures appeared in December in the pages of The New York Times Magazine. A small demonstration was staged at The Times’ door.” (In an editorial printed in The Times, April 17, The Times admitted that most crack addicts are white! I wasn’t surprised that their writer would drag out some oldie but goodies stereotypes about Oakland.He even referred to a 1960s Oakland riot. It never happened.)
Instead of covering the city in depth, the writer relied on the favorite black male portraits that The Times and other media sell to white Americans. Though the Occupy movement is 95% white, the writer, Jonathan Mahler, juiced up his copy by using a black rapper for comic relief. Bootsy Riley was offered as spokesperson for Occupy, 75% of whom are from out of town, and since they are white and middle class get away with antics that blacks would be beaten or even shot for.
His being used muffled the dissent about Occupy held by black Oaklanders including J.R. “Minster of Information,” a genuine “radical” who has a weekly show on Pacifica’s KPFA. I sent a comment to The Times. In it, I reminded them that during the week, they’d run a piece that pointed to the ongoing diminished presence of minority journalists in the media and that coverage of “urban disintegration” as The Times terms it is left to people like their reporter, Jonathan Mahler, who believes in the same stereotypes about blacks as members of the general public. No wonder The Times likes “The Wire” so much even though The Times on its editorial page (April 17, 2012) admitted that most crack use is done by whites, a case of one section of the newspaper being out of sync with the others.The premise of “The Wire” and other products offered by David Simon, is that the inner cities are the crossroads of drug consumption and distribution, a notion that has been refuted by statistics. Fortunately, The Times did use some of the comments of Joseph Anderson, a young black Oakland intellectual and a writing mf. He wrote, August 5, 2012
“I believe that The New York Times motto, instead of, “All the news that’s fit to print”, should be, “All the news we’re *fittin’* to print!”, or “Protecting your bigotry and ignorance, and in service to U.S. imperialism, since 1851!…
“A person reading this article would be oblivious of the Lake Merritt area (with its shimmering lake and a Lakeshore Avenue indoor-outdoor coffee shop where Black guys play chess all afternoon); in Berkeley as its Berkeley address); the Oakland waterfront Jack London Square and marina area; the serene “Oakland estuary and promenade; one of the loveliest and largest theaters in the country (the Paramount, where Ani DiFranco breathtakingly sang, “Self Evident”, about 9-11); an internationally famous jazz club & *sushi* restaurant (Yoshi’s); there’s the always colorful Fruitvale Latino restaurant/retail/grocery/foodtruck area centered around the Fruitvale Bart.
“But, you see, the NYT’s readily stereotypes a city with a large Black/Brown/non-white population as some sort of militant ‘Mau-Mau’ ghetto, where the problem is, according to such stories,
*BLACK* PEOPLE — not the racist, corporate, banking, check- cashing systems, and, especially, police force that victimizes them and anyone seeking multiculturally conscious, positive, sociopolitical change.
“Ironically, Oakland is the only city I’ve lived in or known where white progressives can live in the heart of the ‘hood and not be targeted for their color in their large, vintage, Victorian houses with tall windows, high ceilings, wall features, wood floors, and huge rooms. You’d assume entirely the opposite after reading this article.
“And, ironically, the vast majority of the Black Bloc vandals (and the police agent provocateurs among/instigating/inspiring them) are *WHITE* (black clothes typically being the only black thing about them)! The city across the Bay, San Francisco, where one of the largest instances (“Black Bloc”/provocateurs) of indiscriminate, ‘Occupy-associated’ violence against property occurred (in another largely minority area) — and where a *white* guy on the 2nd/3rd story roof of a building threw stones/bricks down at people below — is not even mentioned! My hope is that gentrification doesn’t precipitously depopulate Oakland of Black people the way San Francisco almost has.
“Of course, most of us in the broader Occupy Oakland movement realized that the indiscriminate violence of the Black Bloc types (and provocateurs), who packed the GA’s and prevented the wiser of us (myself, other Blacks, et al) from passing a nonviolence resolution, would, among other negative things, provide the ‘ammunition’ on a silver platter for exactly this kind of muddled, conflationary, facile stereotyping and *LLLAZY*, so-called, ‘JOURNALISM’.”
Bill Berkowitz wrote: “This type of bullpucky is precisely why the so-called Occupy movement — or whoever is acting under that banner in Oakland — is winning nothing while the Tea Party organizes for the future.”
After smearing blacks as sexists, anti-Semites and most recently as homophobes (see my forthcoming essay “The Roving of Black America,” Black Renaissance Noire), maybe it’s not surprising that a Times writer would smear a city with a large black population. In fact its columnists are behaving as unpaid campaign workers for the Romney campaign and The Time’s guide to blacks and poverty is Charles Murray, whose book, “The Bell Curve,” accepts some of the same stereotypes that are still directed at Murray’s ethnic group, the Scots Irish, whom Benjamin Franklin called “white savages.” This man is rejected by his peers, scholars who ripped “The Bell Curve,” which was praised by second generation Aryans over at The New Republic and Commentary, and The New York Times Book Review yet he is often chosen by The Timesto lead a national discussion about race and poverty. Murray accepted money from The Pioneer Fund which is described by the London Sunday Telegraph (3/12/89) as a “neo-Nazi organization closely integrated with the far right in American politics.” The fund’s mission is to promote eugenics. Are the editors of the Times really comfortable Murray’s ideas?
The New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, a Bork fan, who believes falsely that Affirmative Action is a black program, exclusively, a line that encourages hate crimes, is even giving advice to the Romney campaign and mouthpiece for the one percent, Bill Keller, agrees with Imus that the president doesn’t have the necessities to be president. There’s even a Spring time for the Tea Party on the editorial page of The Times led by David Brooks, who threw a lavish wet kiss at the recent Tea Party candidate for Senator from Texas, because he went to good schools that are training grounds for the one percent. For those who need a translator to understand Brooks’ copy, a six year old sums up the complaints of the Tea Party better than Brooks and the Senator of whom he is a fan:
“A 6-year-old boy named Isaac Anthony has been filmed giving Americans top-10 reasons why not to vote for Barack Obama. The video of Anthony was uploaded to YouTube by a group calling itself The Patriot Update.the most-controversial moment is when Anthony says Obama wants to take guns away from good guys, and makes his point by firing a toy gun pulled from a holster on his belt”:
The Top 10 reasons why Americans should not vote for Obama are listed below:
10. He takes money from people who work hard and gives it to people who don’t work at all
9. He wants everybody to wait in a long line to see the doctor.
8. He thinks babies are a burden.
7. He wants to keep people on welfare and food stamps so that they will vote for him.
6. He doesn’t want Americans to drill for oil or mine for coal.
5. He lets bad guys into our country.
4. He wants to take guns away from good guys.
3. Mr. and Mrs. Obama are not proud of America.
2. He bows down to leaders of other countries—embarrassing!
1. Nobody knows where he came from.”[2]
Maybe The Times columnist’s attitude toward the Tea Party carried over to Mahler’s attitude toward Oakland.
And though black Oaklanders have a distinguished record in the West since before the Gold Rush, the writer at one point featured Felix Mitchell, a drug dealer, who’s been dead since 1986!
My neighbors and I who live in the Oakland flat lands were dismissed as bums, which is also typical of The Times’ coverage of Oakland which, in this piece and others champion gentrification as a solution to Oakland’s problems. When they ran a supplement called “Bay Citizen,” a crime reporter named Shoshana Walter was assigned to Oakland. Jerry Brown called gentrification “elegant density” which he saw as bringing 10,000 new (white) residents to downtown Oakland. They’ve brought 5,000. Half elegant?
The only “black hole” in Oakland is the vacuum left by the exodus of blacks who were priced out of the city by Jerry Brown and his developer friends, who contributed to his campaign. Phil Tagami, the most powerful Oakland developer, a man ,who has gamed the Oakland political system, is called “The real mayor of Oakland,” yet the writer calls Oakland a “radical city,” because of the commotion caused by people, most of whom don’t even live here? Like most eastern journalists who parachute into Oakland for a hot minute, he hung out a lot downtown and judged a city that is 56.1 square miles by some excitement happening there,which is like judging Mars from a single crater. It wasn’t until I wrote “Blues City, A Walk In Oakland,” did I realize how vast and variegated the city is. And why are Occupiers,who are causing the excitement, taking out their anxiety on a black president like the white progressives, who delivered the House to the Tea Party because they told people to stay home as an act of protest against the president. Because they weren’t gratified enough by Obama’s policies? Because they didn’t get him to endorse same sex marriage fast enough and even when he did he still got criticized by The Nation’s Richard Kim? Maybe Kim wants to turn gay issues over to Paul Ryan. Maybe he’s masochistic like the white women who want to turn their reproductive systems over to be managed by Romney and friends. The progressives whine that the Prez didn’t close Gitmo fast enough. Never mind that the fact that the Republican mean girl party blocked this effort in Congress.
Tea Party network CNN, which made an alliance with the Tea Party Express led by a man who refers to the president as a “Muslim,” and CNBC, and Fox, Tea Party sympathizers all, demand that Obama bring the unemployment rate below 8 percent.
For whites it’s 7.4 percent. Moreover The Christian Science Monitor reports that “Whites’ net worth is 20 times that of blacks.” So where does Patricia Murphy get off announcing on Rev. Sharpton’s Aug. 9, show that “the president doesn’t have a great economic record.” And why do the majority of whites, according to Gallup, disapprove of the way that the president is handling the economy. For whites, he’s done pretty well. The white Occupy movement seems spoiled and indulgent in light of these favorable statistics for whites. Why are the networks, who profit from designing the racial divide–a CNN executive told Rick Sanchez that “race sells”–with such stunts as “Black In America” or “Hispanic in America,” but no “White In America,” all of sudden lumping the good unemployment statistics for whites in with those of blacks and Hispanics?
Why are black rappers and intellectuals supporting the Occupy people, who do their clowning in a cash strapped city instead of where the one percent live? Why don’t they occupy Palm Springs? Or La Jolla, where the Romneys are building yet another a big old hoggish estate from his earnings as a no tax paying scavenger capitalist, who says that he got $100,000 salary from an organization for which he did no work, yet he and his friends accuse blacks of yearning for “free stuff.”
Don’t the students among Occupy know that Obama has done more for students than the last four presidents? Aren’t the young Occupy women aware that it’s Obama who stands between them and Republican patriarchs who see their uteri as Republican real estate? Like in slavery days when Nazi Germany’s southern U.S. predecessors and mentors, two of whom grace Mount Rushmore, bid on the wombs of black women? Do they want to turn their uteri over to Santorum and Romney, and Ryan who are against Planned Parenthood and want to Bork Roe v. Wade? What’s the matter with these women? The Monitor continues: “All racial groups lost ground in the recession, but blacks and Hispanics lost a bigger share of their net worth, a new study finds. As a result, the wealth gap is at its widest in at least 25 years.”
Yet the majority of whites will vote for Romney, a man who if he hadn’t inherited his dad’s money would be working next to teenagers in a fast foods restaurant. The Tea Party owns Romney’s magic underwear. That’s why when he tried to sneak to the center in the form of one of his campaign workers saying nice things about his Romneycare, Murdoch, Ailes, Coulter and others demanded that if elected he share a co-presidency with Paul Ryan,or be like the ceremonial head while Ryan and the Koch and Murdoch Tea Party runs things. Ryan is the most sinister thug and demagogue in American politics since Richard Nixon. In fact, Nixon is a liberal next to this bully and vindictive creep. He wants to evict the poor from housing while he and his family lives in a Georgian house equipped with six bed rooms and eight bathrooms. He enjoys six hundred dollar bottles of wine, perhaps paid for by his sponsors the Koch brothers. He says he idolizes Ayn Rand, the selfishness Queen of Hell, and a hypocrite who accepted Medicare and Social Security. So did members of Reagan and Ryan’s families. Including Ryan himself. The Boston Globe on Aug. 14 exposed more Ryan hypocrisy: “In 2009, as Rep. Paul D. Ryan was railing against President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package as a ‘wasteful spending spree,’ he wrote at least four letters to Obama’s secretary of energy asking that millions of dollars from the program be granted to a pair of Wisconsin conservation groups, according to documents obtained by the Globe.”
On the day of the announcement Tea Party network, CNN, kissed his ass all day. They’re still kissing his ass. Only Soledad is standing up to the Republican ticket and surrogates. You can imagine the scolding she’s probably receiving from her bosses. Watch them hand all of the presidential debate victories to Romney. Watch moderator Candy Crowley, who hates Obama, try to trip up the president while lobbing soft ball questions to Romney. No black journalist gets to question the candidates. When Hispanics asked for representation, they were rejected by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which concluded that the four white journalist,including Tea Party mole, Candy Crowley, could represent all Americans. They said:
”. . . we strongly believe that the four journalists we have named see their assignment as representing all Americans in their choice of topics and questions.”
Moreover, even with these favorable statistics, while whites believe that the country is moving in the wrong direction, blacks and Hispanics, who will vote overwhelmingly for the president, are optimistic about the future. Which reminds me of a quote from Irish playwright Terence MacSwiney: “It’s not those who inflict the most, but those that endure the most, that shall prevail.” We need a psychologist like Susan Block, who is not afraid to say the unsayable to comment on why the majority of whites, who still dominate the economic cultural and political life of the U.S., are in “despair” as Ryan puts it.
Maybe it’s not because whites are spoiled or pampered, it’s because they’re used to favorable treatment from both the private and public sectors from the time that white nationalist governments turned over trillions of dollars of assets belonging to Native Americans, blacks, Asian Americans and Mexicans and Chinese and Japanese Americans to whites by force or stood by as white mobs seized these assets until today when banks have had to pay penalties for steering blacks and browns to sub prime loans, when they were eligible for conventional loans. Every government program, even the New Deal’s, G.I. Bill, Social Security, which blacks didn’t start receiving until the 1950s, Medicare, Medicaid and Affirmative Action have benefited whites the most. Whites, no matter their credit ratings are favored by the banks over blacks and Hispanics (and the white middle class and working class’s support of Mayor Bloomberg’s “stop and frisk” fascism, an excuse for the decadent and corrupt NYPD to cop some free feels from black and brown women, the kind of measures that were used in occupied Paris and Amsterdam in the 1930s and 40s, also blows away Joan Walsh’s class argument? That the plight of the white working class and the black working class is the same? And why don’t her critics at angryblacklady.com, one of the liveliest and linguistically inventive of political blogs, get as much media time as she? Why is Mayor Bloomberg standing by while his cops are molesting black women sexually, and using his SS Stop and Frisk policy as an excuse? And why aren’t New York feminists expressing the same kind of outrage about sexual assault against their black and brown sisters as they did when they demonstrated in Foley Square so that the innocent Central Park 5 might be convicted? As for Bloomberg. Doesn’t he know that in early 1900s the SS NYPD used to go around beating up people because they “looked Jewish?”[3]).
Of course, I can understand why some Southern white guys over fifty and the Confederate guerrilla caucus in Congress want to restore white male rule. They are either chumps or on the payroll of the Koch brothers, and I can even understand why some white male progressives want to glom on to Ron Paul (even though he is the author of racist and anti-Semitic writings, speaking of self-loathing). Black radicals have accused white progressives of “white chauvinism” since the 1920s. But white women, who got tricked into voting for Bush I, who wouldn’t have been elected had it not been for their vote, must be imprisoned in their own homes or are bullied into voting against their interests. Maybe they’re being beaten up! [4] Maybe Nicholas Kristof should interrupt his worldwide mission of blaming chauvinism on black and brown men in the Middle East and Africa temporarily and begin an intervention? See why white women are voting for their oppressors. Come on home.
Maybe they were scared by the Willie Horton ads designed by Larry McCarthy, who now works for a Romney Super Pac, another case of an Irish American who has lost his way. He’s probably the guy who suggested the latest Romney welfare ad. “Obama is taking white people’s money and giving it to his nigger buddies who don’t want to work.” My translation. Melissa Harris Perry and Rachel Maddow on August 7th fell into this nasty trap by suggesting that welfare benefits black women exclusively when even American Nazi Tom Metzger told Larry King that the typical welfare recipient is a white woman whose husband has abandoned her. Of course, the media hide poor white women. Instead, they flatter white men and women. They pixel out the faces of white parents involved in brawls occurring during their children’s’ soccer games, while associating blacks with monkeys, as NBC did to Gabby Douglas. They had to apologize . They feature the crimes of the poor and hide the crimes of the rich. They featured, with a whole page, a mentally ill black woman who, suffering from post partum depression kidnapped a child from Harlem Hospital and raised the child as her own, but hid the crimes of the one-percenters like Pfizer, which is constantly getting in trouble with the law, with a few paragraphs on the business page. No pictures. No arrests.
MSNBC and CNN feminists must get all of their information from The New York Times, which pastes black faces on welfare and every other imagined social evil. In the media, white women are usually shown helping people with their homework or adopting African children. You wouldn’t know from Nicholas Kristof that the typical substance abuser in California is a white woman. Perry, Maddow and Alex Wagner are probably ignorant of it too. Kristof dismissed meth addiction, which has left thousands of white children orphaned, as a “fad.”
McCarthy’s belonging to a Romney Pac must be the reason that some of the Romney Super Pac ads show the vulnerability of white women under black rule along side a grinning Obama. By October they will have Willie Hortonized Obama.
These women get no leadership from Northeastern feminists who are on the payroll of white male chauvinists, which must be why they have singled out black men to take the rap for cruelty to women.
Black men don’t have the power to inflict as much damage on women as say the patriarchs who own MSNBC, Comcast, which finances ALEC, the group that is bent upon disenfranchising black Americans men and women. If Dan Rather is right and the corporations that own the networks guide their content, General Electric still guides the programming of NBC, MSNBC and according to Ann Curry, who left NBC, angry, demand that their women employees wear high heels, even those who spout a feminist line on air. Melissa Harris Perry was wearing high heels during a Saturday, August 11th broadcast. They put pundit Michelle Barnard, the black Tokyo Rose, up to blaming black people for their lack of “personal responsibility,” which lends to the stereotype that blacks of Caribbean ancestry– Orlando Patterson, Juan Williams, etc.– are used to diss traditional American blacks, when she works for General Electric, an outfit that helped make the A bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and built the Fukushima plants four decades ago. Hundreds of thousands of their Japanese sisters were damaged,genetically. Yet the women black and white who are sent to take it to the brothers by network patriarchs believe Chris Brown, Tiger and Cuban Gooding, Jr. are the problem?
Are they the kind of cogs that Ward Churchill has in mind?
Soledad said that when blacks complain about the obstacles against their success in a racist society, they’re making excuses. I don’t know whether that’s her opinion, because she sometimes reads stuff that others write for her. CNN’s Carol Costello’s assignment seems to be that of blasting black NBA players. Why don’t these women exercise “ agency” and devote more time to educating white women who vote for men who use Bronze Age biblical mandates against them.
As for “personal responsibility” General Electric doesn’t pay taxes and covers up the atrocities that this company has committed against women by having surrogates blame everything on the brothers and sisters. “Despite its public relations campaign, G.E. has yet to take responsibility for the problems caused by its involvement in the nuclear weapons industry. Choosing instead to keep making more [television] commercials about the technology behind G.E. products. [G.E. commercial: "All our science, our technology, our mathematics - somehow they add up to moments beyond any calculation."] But all the life-affirming ads money can buy can’t undo the environmental and health damage General Electric has caused.”[5]
They’ve given Melissa Harris Perry a little feminist show which puts the brothers on trial every week. On July 14,2012,she had a chubby white girl, a jr. feminist, come on to choose ,which one is ahead in the race they’ve begun between black women and black men, when the guest comes from an ethnic group that covers up its own cruelty to women and children. Try getting Steven Spielberg to write a film, or David Mamet to write a play, or David Simon to write a series about this. They’re too busy refereeing the conflict between black men and women. Adam Mansbach even has a weekly show called “Father Figures,” on Pacifica radio, which snipes at black men every Saturday. Of course, there’s a film called “Jolene,” which, based upon a short story by E.L. Doctorow, exposes male cruelty to women, but the villain in this piece is a cartoon drawn wealthy white Christian guy, who lives in Dallas.
So it’s black guys and white Christian guys who are responsible for woman hating?
While my daughter Tennessee and I were visiting lecturers the University of Northern Alabama, Florence, Alabama, which has one of the best writing departments in the country, we had dinner with writers Pam Kingsbury (“Inner Voices, Inner Views: Conversations With Southern Writers”) and Anita Garner (“Southland”) at Ichaban, a Japanese restaurant across the lot from the Southern Restaurant, a shrine because Elvis used to sleep on its floor. Florence, Alabama, has quite a musical legacy. It’s the birthplace of W.C. Handy and Sam Phillips who owned Sun Records. I asked Pam why Southern women vote for men who don’t mean them any good. (They even go around collecting money to build statues to Jefferson Davis whose troops were five minutes away from firing at Southern white women during the Richmond bread riots; white women suffered hardships under Confederate rule.)[6] She said that it’s because they are taught to be submissive to their husbands. They’re not the only ones.
Will the majority of white women vote again for men who are at war with them, (and why are they still voting against their interests almost fifty years after the modern feminist movement began by borrowing the SNNC manifesto. Why don’t media promoted Northeastern feminists go South again as they did during the Civil Rights Movement? Free their white sisters from male oppression. Maybe Naomi Wolf, who found the innocent Central Park 5, guilty, can lead the effort).
They can’t count on the Jane Austen circle at Salon.com. One of these feminist Salon.com writers named Irin Carmon wrote this beautiful tribute to Ann Romney, calling this woman, whose extravagance makes Jackie O. seem like a peasant, a “Victorian Heroine,” a woman who is a major in her husband’s war against women. I took her reference to Ann as “old fashioned” to be code words.Ann Romney’s horse eats better than my neighbors. What gives? Will white women continue to oppose the president as this Occupy thing is doing, which hasn’t elected a single politician who might change things. Bill Berkowitz is right.
This is the difference between progressives and blacks. Chris Hedges says that there isn’t a difference between Obama and Romney. Maybe for him and other progressives. If Romney wins, it won’t effect the investment portfolios of the president’s critics at The Nation and The Progressive magazines, but for blacks it means returning to segregated lunch counters and a Bork court that will overturn the Voting Rights Act and the Republican policy of Genthanasia (the non-violent weeding out of undesirable cultures)[7] will continue. If millions of delusional whites, who somehow believe that they have something in common with the one percent whites, suffer as the safety net is shred, they will just be considered collateral damage. And maybe when those whites over fifty, the Tea Party’s base, find themselves rummaging through garbage cans for food, or competing with younger people for jobs, in an effort to make ends meet, they’ll realize that they have been had. Maybe.
You hear about Ayn Rand, who hated collectivism, yet helped herself to entitlements, but Raymond B.Cattell is the philosopher the Republicans want to keep hidden in the basement. His ideas of Genthanasia, the non-violent phasing out of “moribund” cultures, would explain the Republicans attempt to end the food stamp program and Medicaid. The elimination of housing subsidies that was begun by Reagan, would send thousands of people into the street where they would become a police problem, which is what the Republicans want.
“When it was announced in the July 1997 APA Monitor that Raymond B. Cattell was to receive the American Psychological Foundation’s prestigious Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement to the Science of Psychology, it was noted that Dr. Cattell decided to work in psychology because it “would be the most direct way to solve the political and economic problems around him” (APF recognizes, 1997. p. 48). In other words, Dr. Cattell’s science was intended to solve social and political problems. I believe that, when viewed in historical context and despite his protests to the contrary, it is clear that Cattell’s notion of “phasing out” what he calls “moribund cultures” is little more than support for genocide.” Mahler, Barry, The Social Context of Science History and Philosophy of Psychology Bulletin, Vol. No 2,1998
Ishmael Reed is the publisher of Konch at www.ishmaelreedpub.com. His latest book is “Going Too Far”. He can be reached through his website: http://ishmaelreed.org/
Notes.
[1] Mahler, Jonathan,”Oakland, The Last Refuge of Radical America,” The New York Times, August 1,2012
[2] Posted Tuesday, July 31, 2012 12:5 pm Brennan N. Johnson Special to the AmNews
[3] Johnson, Marilynn, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Oct 31, 2004)
[4] Donovan, Patricia, “Domestic violence found in stable white families”, State University of New York at Buffalo Reporter, Vol.28,No.16: Jan.16,1992
”A new study of white, working-class women in relatively stable families has revealed what the researchers call a horrific picture “of lives saturated with serious domestic violence.” “The findings are part of a larger study funded by a $500,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation that will be published by Beacon next year. The study was conducted by Lois Weis, professor of education at UB, and Michelle Fine, professor of social psychology in the Graduate Center, City University of New York.“The researchers defined “serious domestic violence” as battering intended to cause serious physical injury. Ninety-two percent of white female respondents said that such domestic violence was directed against them, their mothers and/or sisters, either in their birth households or in later relationships. By comparison, 62 percent of black female subjects reported similar levels of violence in their lives.Weis called the results “extremely disturbing. This does not mean that 92 percent of all white working-class women are or have been victims of serious domestic violence,” she said. “It does, however, suggest a far more serious problem in this population than has otherwise been acknowledged.”
[5] Chasnoff, Debra “ Deadly Deception:General Electric, Nuclear Weapons, and Our Environment” (Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary Short:1991:29 mins.)
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