Dave Chappelle on SNL and Jews
“I know the Jewish people have been through terrible things all over the world but you can’t blame that on Black Americans. You just can’t.”
Dave Chappelle in his SNL monologue, Nov. 12, 2022
Chappelle got one quiet whoop and dead silence when he said that. He thanked the person for the whoop. I’ve heard people say on line that the silence was telling.
It wasn’t. I’ve never met a Jew who blamed the terrible things we’ve been through on Black Americans. With all due respect to Mr. Chappelle, and in his case I respect him a whole lot, one Hell of a lot, for a whole lot of reasons, that’s crap.
He talked a lot about Jews in his monologue, basically pointing out that saying nasty stuff about us is more dangerous than saying nasty stuff about other minorities. He also talked about how Hollywood is heavily Jewish, an emphasis he repeated, and said that some people might connect the dots, though connecting those dots isn’t necessarily valid. And he talked about how making generalizations about Jews was less acceptable than making generalizations about Italians or Blacks, saying that in Jews’ case it’s all viewed as coincidences. As he started out on this topic, he says he learned early on that there were two words one did not say in sequence, and those words are “the” and “Jews.”
I’m glad saying those words in sequence is unacceptable. Of course I also don’t say “the” in sequence with “Blacks” or “gays” because to do so is to make generalizations based on belonging to a minority, and making negative generalizations about people based on their minority membership is precisely what bigotry is. Yes, Jews are unusually organized when it comes to bigotry but that’s because we have such long experience with it and we have experience with where it can go and how quickly. We’ve seen populations turn on us very quickly, emphatically including in places we felt safe and places to which we were extremely loyal.
As regards Hollywood, yes, it’s heavily Jewish. That’s no surprise; the film industry was developed there by a bunch of ex-vaudeville Jews making silent pictures. Hollywood is heavily Jewish for the same reason that Broadway is: Entertainment was a field Jews were allowed into, like retail was. We weren’t in the fields that were critical to the country: energy, telecommunications, transportation, steel, chemicals, military hardware, agriculture. We were vaudevillians and peddlers who developed the movie and television industries and got big in major retail. We’re not there because of a conspiracy; we’re there because we built the industry.
It doesn’t take coordination to turn on someone who turns on us. Doing something antisemitic, like Mel Gibson did, will offend a whole lot of Jews independently and, when an industry is heavily Jewish, that will look coordinated. The dots don’t need connecting. If you offend enough dots you’ll get the same result.
Chappelle was comparing two cases: that of Kanye and that of Kyrie Irving, a basketball player who published a link online to a film with antisemitic content. Chappelle understood what happened to Kanye and approved of it but thought that Irving got caught in Kanye’s storm. It bothered Chappelle that as Irving was slow to apologize the list of demands for him to return to playing started to grow. And it is here that he said what I quoted at the top.
If you spread antisemitic content there should be consequences. This has nothing to do with being Black. If Chappelle’s contention is that being Black should give one any kind of immunity on this, I disagree. I don’t care who takes an ethnic shot at me, it’s an ethnic shot and should be treated as one, and if someone is slow to apologize for one there’s a reason for that. On the other hand, an ethnic shot is a matter of individual responsibility, not group responsibility. If Kanye and Irving both come down on Jews in some way within a short amount of time, this is not cause to hold their ethnicity responsible for their actions. If that is Chappelle’s contention then I agree with it.
He has Jewish friends, a lot of them, among them Jon Stewart, who warns that censorship would not be an effective response to this. I agree with him; it would not be. There may be things Chappelle is not keeping track of, having no reason to. He might not be aware that wearing a skullcap on a lot of college and university campuses can get one abused at the moment or that we are the only minority whom it is politically correct to abuse, under the guise of antizionism. Of course a skullcap doesn’t indicate that one is Israeli. It indicates that one is Jewish. While this and the antisemitism unleashed by Trump’s approval of bigotry has increased drastically in recent years, Jews are of course more sensitive than usual to antisemitism because at the moment antisemitism poses more risks. I doubt that if Chappelle ever goes to church there is an armed police presence outside to protect the worshippers but as a Jew I worship like that now if the service is well attended.
When it comes to Black people Chappelle doesn’t want Jews to become part of the problem. Spreading antisemitic tropes on shared content does not constitute Jews becoming part of the problem, it constitutes the sharer becoming part of our problem. Don’t blame us for reacting to attacks. We have to. We know damned well we have no choice. This isn’t about power, it’s about survival.
11/18/2022 @ 7:21 pm
“Jews are of course more sensitive than usual to antisemitism because at the moment antisemitism poses more risks”
Does it though? You mention police outside your temple, but when you’re driving, do you worry about being pulled over by police and shot sixteen times? Who has suffered most and why is it a competition? Point fingers at white people, rather than one another.
This summer I read The 1619 Project. Have you read it yet? It’s an enormously difficult read. I could manage about twenty pages in a sitting, lots of Kleenex, horror, anger, incredulity. A few days had to pass before I felt able to pick it up again.
Right after finishing The 1619 Project, PBS aired the Ken Burns doc about how the Holocaust was experienced in America. Same thing, could only watch an hour, more wads of Kleenex, horror, anger, incredulity, followed by a few days of rest.
My lifelong high school friend who is Jewish, also watched it, and we discussed it painfully. I told him how pissed I was that no one ever taught us such important aspects of history at our high school c1968. His response was when he was in temple, it was discussed all the time. He also said that Black people knew the details of their ancestors and history too, Jim Crow, redlining, not one Tulsa, but multiple Tulsas. He said the reason I didn’t know was because none of this happened to me or my ancestors.
Black people and Jews are finally getting amplification, and telling their stories, not just in documentaries and Pulitzer prize winning anthologies, but in films and television, books and journalism. Although it’s really hard to hear, white people need to hear it. Hearing it changes perspectives. There is power in standing together. Pointing fingers at who had the worse deal diminishes that.
11/19/2022 @ 8:51 am
I never discuss who had the worse deal because as a discussion it’s a non-sequitur, and I’m certainly not doing that here. Our experiences aren’t comparable in anything but scope, and our experiences in America aren’t comparable, Period. We have no experience with the kind of ancestral cultural eradication they went through, nor with anything like American slavery. They have no experience with having one out of every three of them on Earth murdered within four years, nor do they have remotely the kind of experience with Tulsas that we do. Tulsa was a pogrom. We’ve had tens out thousands of those. Tulsa is what our history looks like. Another difference is how and where we’re defined. American slave-descended ethnicity is an American phenomenon. Jews being far more recent immigrants in general have much more international identification which makes international persecution personally relevant. Phenomena like European pogroms and the Holocaust involve our families. In America, Jews have had it way, way easier than Blacks. How bigotry manifests toward each of us is very different and so don’t compare at all, so I don’t. I never minimize the Black experience with persecution; my history is on the opposite side of that argument, telling other White people they’re not remotely aware of what Black people face here because if they did their attitudes would be very different.
What I’m saying has zero to do with the Black experience in America because that experience does not justify spreading myths about Jews. If we as Jews were to blame Blacks in general for persecution of Jews their experience would be relevant but we’re not.
Not only is that not a mistake I’m making, it’s not a mistake Chappelle is making. That’s not what this is about.
11/19/2022 @ 11:32 am
“Jews are of course more sensitive than usual to antisemitism because at the moment antisemitism poses more risks”
You think you didn’t make a detailed comparison in your initial post, and then again in this response? Maybe give it another (more objective) read. Hint: the word ‘more’ kinda gives you away.
Also, you didn’t answer my question…did you read The 1619 Project? Why do I ask that? Because it seems that you’re unaware of the massive amount of heartbreaking details chronicled by Black historians and activists and assembled there. Four hundred years is a long time. You say you care about Black history too, give it a go. Trust me. You can learn something.
My point was that there has been, and still is, racism/bigotry/discrimination and suffering aplenty. As a woman, I’ve experienced that special brand we get. Do I claim that it’s worse? Hell no. Partitioning ourselves into groups, saying this was worse for me, you had something not as bad and here’s what that was, denies others their own pain.
Finally, you don’t seem to recognize that I’m not taking a side. The Ken Burns doc was equally as horrifying as The 1619 Project. I had zero idea how white America resisted the Holocaust here, and as a white person, my relatives and me stand guilty as charged.
11/19/2022 @ 12:22 pm
Edited approx. 4:48 PM day of publication
I haven’t seen the 1619 project.
You asked “Who has suffered most and why is it a competition?” I’m saying it’s not. I’m saying that who has suffered most, if you could determine that, is an irrelevant question.
There is no respect in which I minimize Black suffering, persecution, lack of privilege, continued oppression that isn’t widely acknowledged, any of that.The problem I have is that Irving is minimizing that of my people.
You point out that it is obvious that I haven’t read the 1619 Project. Fine, but in what respect? Do you think if I’d read it I’d be reacting differently? Why?
11/19/2022 @ 1:28 am
This is a hugely complex problem with no simple answers. Each religion, as well as each nationality has cultural resonances. This is also true of other human organizations such as businessmen, bureaucrats, intellectuals, scientists, etc, where common assumptions are generalities that cannot be presumed for individuals, Yet generalizations are the abstractions of many official policies, and this even reaches into the basic functions of the sciences where ultimate abstractions become mathematics, Human abilities to fabricate multiple pattern standards is our blessing and our sin and there is no simple way to deal with it. Horses, dogs, rats and lobsters, as well as humans, all can be distorted into useful or vicious corruptions. I have no solutions.
11/19/2022 @ 8:56 am
We deal as we can. The best way we can deal is to be honest and careful about the patterns we see and to react to them with appropriate scope. If, for example, we see increasing antisemitic actions among a specific population, we clearly need more outreach with that population.
11/19/2022 @ 1:51 pm
624 pages, originally a shorter Pulitzer Prize winning series in NYTimes. Following that, Nikole Hannah-Jones assembled a massive anthology of essays by the Who’s Who of Black excellence in journalism, activism, scholarship, history, art, literature, all for our edification.
You’ve perhaps read a few of those she included, but guaranteed not all. It’s a commitment and a mind crushing experience, even if you’re Jewish I’d imagine. Last year she spoke at my college to standing room only in the auditorium, with several hundred more backed up outside in the lobby watching on flat screen.
And yes, it’s obvious that you never ‘saw’ it.
11/19/2022 @ 2:52 pm
oooops things I forgot:
re: technology
1. apologies for posting a reply on someone else’s comment thread. I seem to do this a lot, can’t seem to get the hang
2. meant to post an amazon link to 1619P and instead, a giant photo of the book popped up. In no way meant as yelling 🙂
3. Worth mentioning: NH-J’s book was what set the whole CRT movement in motion with the GOP, and the impetus for Trump’s 1776 Commission, is also the first book on most banned book lists, reason enough to read it.
11/20/2022 @ 10:09 pm
That’s not an error, either yours or mine as the programmer. That’s how the system is set up. When you insert a hyperlink, the system goes to the item you linked to and pulls the “featured image” assigned to that link into our post or comment. Even though I built this thing, I still don’t know everything about what it can do. For instance. I didn’t know you could pull hyperlinked images into a comment, which is what you just did in this instance.
11/20/2022 @ 10:13 am
Two updates:
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/35061823/kyrie-irving-apologizes-deeply-questionable-sunday
and, as to why we care about stuff like this:
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/arrests-at-penn-station-thwart-developing-threat-to-nyc-jewish-community-nypd/3965066/
11/20/2022 @ 2:59 pm
Here are two more updates. Both are short, won’t take much time, a few minutes each
First is Jon Stewart talking with two of his Black writers about the midterm election results, mocking GOP racial paranoia. They are funny, painfully correct, and unified.
Second is Jon Stewart talking with Stephen Colbert about Dave Chapelle, Kanye, and Kyrie. Stewart and Colbert are national treasures. Stewart is brilliant, wise, hilarious, and has a compassionate grasp of both Jewish and Black perspectives. He underlines the importance of understanding the Black community, rather than cancelling. He quotes someone who said “hurt people hurt people”. You’ll be surprised at who.
11/21/2022 @ 1:31 pm
Thanks for those.
I spend some time on Quora. I answer a lot of questions that have to do with Israel and Palestinians and sometimes get into discussions based on my answers or my reaction to others’ answers. Sometimes – often – the questions are deliberately provocative, but if there’s any possibility at all of answering them as opposed to dismissing them I do that. In part I do that because I’ve learned things from other people who did that.
I don’t know what the appropriate thing would have been with Kyrie though apparently in addition to benching the guy he ended up in a whole lot of conversations with people explaining why what he was pushing wasn’t factual and why people would get upset at his pushing them. That part’s great. The other part, I don’t know. I don’t know the best way to handle that. I do know it had to be handled because neither he nor his team would have been better off if he hadn’t been seriously answered in such a way that he had to listen. It really wouldn’t be healthy for him or the team to be viewed as antisemitic while playing in Brooklyn.
Kanye is right that “hurt people hurt people.” I once had a conversation with an extremely wise friend of mine in which he told me that the root of all evil was fear. The more I thought about it the more right he got.
By the way, regarding the 1619 Project, what exactly convinces you that my knowledge of Black persecution is severely limited? The only thing I can think of is arguments I’ve had with Ron, but those arguments are never about the Black experience. I never say to him “you didn’t have it bad.” I”m not qualified to, nor am I inclined to minimize that experience; where I typically live politically is on the other side of that argument, arguing with people who do minimize that experience. Our arguments, and we haven’t had one of these in a long time, center on two things: the most effective strategems to combat racism and the nature of the perspective of racist Whites. Both of these arguments have to do with how to approach White people and I am as qualified as he is on that subject. Both of these arguments assume that action is necessary and appropriate. I have no reason to be deferential in those conversations. I realize my lack of deference rubs you the wrong way but I made my living in sales for a long time and so there are certain things I’m sensitive to that are important. It’s always about how to address the issue most effectively. We don’t argue about the necessity of addressing the issue or the scope of the issue, nor is it at all important to me to be more right despite how it may look. I argue about content and I’m devoted to those arguments because they’re important. I as an actor am beside the point. I don’t care if I look as if I have expertise or not. Frankly, Ron and I passed that question years ago.
11/21/2022 @ 6:09 pm
I’m your age, and I’ve become aware of how the conversation about race has changed over the past couple years, in part because I’m in a community that’s a third BIPOC and LGBTQ and 100% GenZ, not sure I would have otherwise. As a lifelong leftie lib I’ve always felt fairly racially aware. Then we got a BLM chapter at my workplace. Nikole Hannah-Jones was a recent guest speaker, and I instantly understood a. why she is a titan, and b. how little I really knew. Her talk was why I read The 1619 Project. I am not saying I’m an expert now, just that I learned tons of information that hasn’t been available until Black people got the mic.
I know you care deeply, but you can present as an expert on racism, which I’m not sure a white person can be. The current conversations, Black journalism, and lit will interest you and freshen up your perspective. You’ll also truly get why the GOP is trying so hard to prevent what they’re calling CRT. I’ll make you a deal. Read it, and I’ll read a book of your choosing 🙂
This morning, it felt like hate is blowing up our country. The threats to the Jewish community that you cited, the shooting at the LGBTQ bar, Kanye back on twitter, all in a single weekend. The NYTimes published a gorgeous op ed by a Black pastor (sorry am forgetting his name) that said basically that Blacks and Jews need to get together and flex, hundreds of percents more eloquently and cohesively than I did in my comment. I have a free academic NYTimes account which grants me limited privileges, so don’t know if I can link it here as a gift, but I’ll try. If you have an account, I’ll at least get the title and author. Brb…
11/21/2022 @ 6:21 pm
Blacks and Jews, Again
Michael Eric Dyson
11/21/2022 @ 6:24 pm
that’s gifted so you should be able to get behind the paywall. anyone else who might want to read it too.
P.S. I don’t follow sportsball, so know exactly zero about Kyrie, except now that he’s in the news.
11/22/2022 @ 12:44 am
Racism is typically a White phenomenon, not a Black one. I listen carefully. There are things I notice. One is that most White people are offended if thought of as racist. In our youth racists were unabashedly proud of their racism, a lot like antisemitism is in the Middle East in that substantial portions of the population do not view it as anything to feel guilty about. This being offended by being viewed as racist says a lot. They’ll tell you they treat everyone equally and they’ll mean it. What do we need to know about racism when in this generation a whole lot of White people who behave in racist ways do not admit their racism to themselves?
If you’re going to combat racism, it helps to understand where we are.
I assume you know that Ron, L in the Southeast, Myriad, and I co-authored a book about racism several years ago. How this happened concerns a conversation that I think took place on OurSalon. There was a long conversation about racism, I think on Ron’s blog, between the four of us and a truck driver who lived not far from where I lived at the time in North Carolina by the screen name of Catnlion. After the conversation, Ron suggested that the four of us, all of whom participated in that conversation, base a book on the thread. There were a ton of conversations while we were putting that book together, mainly about how we should approach the conversation. The book took over a year to write. Also, we were concerned about what the book was for. Who were we trying to reach? What were we trying to accomplish? We were after a centrist audience, an audience that was behaving in more racist ways than they thought and an audience who really didn’t get the extent or nature of racism at the time. How do we reach that audience? This is where our conversations really started. What you’re looking at is a continuation of earlier conversations started there. Ron suggested the book because he found a lot of merit in contributions from all four of us, two women, two men, one of each Black, one of each White. This might help you understand the dynamic between Ron and me.
11/22/2022 @ 6:40 am
You four folks were sincere and earnest and noble in your book writing intentions. I recognize that, and love you for it. That was ten years ago though, and the conversation and the content has changed, dynamically, radically. When you write, I can tell that you don’t see it.
Black people are grabbing the wheel, and are disinterested in white saviors. They’re writing, speaking, in media, politics, journalism, and they know far more about racism, antiracism, Black experience, history, and the methodology of white resistance than we do. I’m encouraging you to open your mind to what is newly available to us, and to take a little break from talking about what white people should do, and what you do. If you read even only HNJ’s opening essay in 1619, you might recognize where you are and what more there is to learn.
Learning becomes harder as we get older. I feel it too. Yet isn’t it textbook white privilege to think we already know enough? After George Floyd’s murder, I started reading down the list of best selling Black writers, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X Kendi, Colson Whitehead, Damon Young, Michael Harriot. Reading Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and James Baldwin in college started opening my eyes, but there were only a handful of published Black writers back then. There’s a multitude of contemporary Black writers assembled in 1619, and they are much more difficult to read, page after 692 pages. I couldn’t always, and some days picked up the new Stephen King instead. Yet I’m convinced I need to hear their voices, we all need to hear them, which is why ironically, I’m trying to talk to a white person about race. Maybe the hand is up. Maybe it’ll drop though.
Re: Kanye. One reason Kanye gets the mic, is that yay, Black people have the mic now, in ways they did not when you wrote your book. As with any group, there are nasty noisy people, in Kanye’s case, someone who is mentally disabled and against his own race. See also Candace Owens and Clarence Thomas.
Ennyhoo. My offer still stands. If you read Nikole H-J, I’ll read whatever book you think I need to read, and we’ll meet back here in the spring to discuss. Could be fun!
P.S. I know you’re thinking I’m a pain in your ass and I’m fine with that. We’re wordy old frenemies who go way back, an honorable relationship in my view. Now you know my first name. I still don’t know yours. Someday.
11/20/2022 @ 10:26 pm
The comments about polling errors are dead to rights. I was a pollster once. I quit when I was instructed not to approach “certain” individuals when attempting to collect polling data. Attempts to modernize polling with online polling are laughably bad. You.Gov is, first of all, a fraud. It should not be allowed to use the .gov domain category because it is NOT a government agency…but no one ever talks about that. You.Gov polls are invalid because people earn points by responding to polls, which are convertible into things of value (not being a member I am not sure how this works.) Anyone who takes a poll under those conditions is suspect from the outset. Online polling is also questionable because they can be easily manipulated. We just saw that with Elon Musk conducting a fake 24 hour poll on Twitter to give him cover for letting Trump back onto Twitter. The poll was fake because Twitter has been widely abandoned (stupidly) by the left-of-center population en masse, leaving only the Maggots to take the pol…but Musk is venal enough to have concocted the poll results out of whole cloth.
Even more troubling is the manner in which reporters and editors cherry pick the poll results to get the answers they want. The most common trick in this category is the practice of using NATIONAL polling to predict the results of an election.
The late House speaker Tip O’Neil was famous for his aphorism, “All politics is local.”
The media has completely forgotten this vital maxim, beginning back in 1948, when the media predicted a landslide for Dewey. Remember the picture of a triumphant Harry Truman holding the newspaper with the Dewey Wins headline? Bad polling did that. In 2016, Clinton was misled by the national polls into believing the race was in the bag when it wasn’t.
In the recent by-election, the media noggins were following the national results when the only polls that really matter are the instate polls. They do this over and over again.
11/22/2022 @ 2:49 am
No doubt language is rather useful but it has its major problems. The term racism implies genetics and in that sense, skin color can imply genetic differences but there are many Jews of varied genetics so the term puzzles me in this context. Both my parents came from Jewish backgrounds but, simply put, none of us were, in any way, religious and, although many of our relatives were religious, it had very little effect on their characters and although a ham sandwich did seem to be connected in a most strange way to Jewish diet, many other distinctly Jewish foods were most welcome. Having lived in Israel for a couple of years and found both Jews and Palestinians most congenial personally, the situation there seems to me unnecessarily disturbing and an immense tragedy. for both factions. Individuals of any nation cannot be judged personally as to their nationality and character and anything that divides our species from the now terribly threatening behaviors of civilization to all life on the planet does nothing to indicate that human intellect lives up to the pride that humans exhibit in their species.
11/22/2022 @ 6:07 am
‘Talking to the Wall’:
Things to know and some things you can say when your conversation
is about race and you feel like you are talking to the wall. https://a.co/d/izIaEB6
11/22/2022 @ 7:20 am
“You four folks were sincere and earnest and noble in your book writing intentions.”
Suzanne,
Have you acquired and read the book?
There’s much about the concept of the approach that is prescient and relevant even in today’s environment…
The primary difference between then and now being that Trump has given voice to those who choose to be openly ignorant and publicly stupid…
The MAGA movement has provided a significant number of white folks a newfound bully pulpit and a megaphone from which utter and amplify feelings and thoughts that were heretofore anathema and socially unacceptable grounds for isolation and ostracism.
11/22/2022 @ 7:31 am
Ron, I’m glad to see you. I have to drive into the Big City today in half an hour, so can’t respond in typical wordy depth. I’ll try to get back to it later.
For now, the tl;dnr version is young people are having none of it. Not Trump, not the GOP, not book bans, not denial of women’s health rights, not denying LGBTQ rights, not guns, not hate, what we old libs dreamed of. It feels like I’ve been waiting for them most of my life.
P.S. Stacy Abrams! Fani Willis! Letitia James! 🙂
11/22/2022 @ 12:20 pm
I’m thrilled that Gen Z is having none of it but Gen Z isn’t in power yet.
You’re my age. My name is Steve, by the way. Being my age you remember that we thought when our generation took over the country would be a radically different place. It turns out that there are a whole lot of people from our generation who are nothing like us.
Gen Z probably represents a better bet than we did.
11/22/2022 @ 3:44 pm
I’ve spent gobs of time with GenXers and Millennials also, several thousand of them over 33 yrs. Millennials esp get a bad rap. In any case, they’re ALL more aware and less naive than we were. Younger people are staring into a horrific future, an unlivable climate, pandemics brought on by collapsing habitats, authoritarian governments with nuclear weapons. Lots of them are parents now, so their kids will be living even longer in it. It makes our peace and love and ban the bomb agenda seem quaint.
Greta Thunberg gave a climate symposium speech I heard while driving and it made me have to pull over to listen. She said:
“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
Did she ever nail it, and me, re: hopes for young people. She was 16 with the awareness of someone middle aged, and a leader. There’s a beautiful photo of her with Jane Goodall that is worth googling. Those two.
So Steve! Laughing a little into my keyboard. That only took what, ten years? 🙂
11/22/2022 @ 7:49 am
It’s getting too late to try to ignore the mess and hope that the current avalanche of vicious stupidity will pass. If a vigorous public reaction does not quickly arise to get active response from powerful sectors we cannot survive.
11/22/2022 @ 12:27 pm
There are two questions here. The first is whether we’ll react on time. The second is whether we’ve been so structurally defanged that the scope of our reaction may not be sufficient. When a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin stated that if he were elected a Democrat wouldn’t get elected to that position again he was talking about making it structurally impossible for someone winning the majority of votes to take office. The midterms gave us some cause for optimism in that election deniers were consistently beaten at the polls.
11/22/2022 @ 1:38 pm
Although there is a multitude of different vital problems in the US government the horrifying Supreme Court with the force of the pope in the Catholic Church is so monstrously undemocratic it is amazing it has retained its powers so long without necessary modification.
11/23/2022 @ 9:45 am
The Vatican gunboats arrived on the Potomac 62 years late. I don’t want to say we shouldn’t have Catholic Justices because I know where that leads and Sotomayor is a good Justice but this was religiously intentional.
11/22/2022 @ 1:59 pm
“I’ll try to get back to it later.”
Suzanne,
Please do, and while you’re at it; Please answer my question:
“Have you acquired and read the book?”
11/22/2022 @ 4:04 pm
Ron, of course. Then you can answer one of mine.
You guys may not remember, but all of you wrote so much about what was covered in your book that pretty much everyone on OS back then knew the content. You know me well enough to know that I don’t agree that the Archie Bunkers are redeemable and worth spending precious life energy on.You and Steve believe their minds can be changed though intelligent persuasion. To me this seems akin to my encouraging you to make a case with the highly visible Black men in the seats directly behind Trump at his rallies, wearing Blacks for Trump T shirts. P.S. I would never encourage you to do that. So no, I did not purchase your book.
I don’t remember the Catn Lion person, but do remember that guy who told you that unless you could name five painters, he wouldn’t engage in discussion with you. He wrote a post about going to the ‘ghetto’ or ‘inner city’ or some codeword, to share his artistic talents with little children, and posted photos of them with ‘beautiful grins’, noting how ‘surprisingly crafty’ they were, or some such white bs. You were too polite. I was too rude, and it all sailed over his head regardless.
Worth noting is that OS was my first experience of trolls. Given the state of trolling now. those people seem like Sunday school teachers.
So my question is have you read The 1619 Project? Nikole Hannah-Jones made it for Black people way more than White people, a display of Black excellence, strength, power, survival, pride, and beauty. Also, like multiple other fierce and powerful Black women, she is unafraid of Trump, and deserves your eyeballs for that is my thought
11/22/2022 @ 6:25 pm
It’s not the Archie Bunkers we’re after. It never was.
As to the guy you’re referencing, whose name I forget and who lived in NJ, I would have had him more in mind that Ron would have. I got along with him OK and Ron didn’t. Ron would have agreed with you that the guy was unredeemable – in fact, I’m pretty sure he did. No, that’s not Catnlion. This was an older guy with an older vocabulary who understood that things are racially inequitable and that that is something worth addressing. His vocabulary was, shall we say, offputting in that it was in general use years ago but at the time we interacted wasn’t and he wasn’t the sort of guy who took vocabulary correction kindly. His views, on the other hand, were considerably more redeemable than his vocabulary was. I remember you dismissed him quickly. Maybe you were right. He was definitely a curmudgeon but he was no Archie Bunker.
Catnlion was a truck driver in North Carolina who grew up poor around Black people and figured he was in the same boat as they were.
When we were at OS I was acutely aware of the population of guys who were basically decent but who detested PC. I knew a few of them. The population I’m interested is a bit to the right of them.
11/23/2022 @ 8:13 am
I dismissed him? I have no memory of him. If he was as you describe, I like that I did.
What do you mean that his vocabulary was old? Because it surely seems that old vocabulary is alive, contemporary, and well on twitter, where I deleted my account the day Musk came in with the sink. I do not miss it. Mary Trump, maybe.
11/23/2022 @ 1:22 am
I’m reasonably certain that his name is Terry McKenna.
My problem with him was that he refused to acknowledge and accept the notion that white people must acknowledge and be held to account for the effects of systemic racism.
If I recall, I told him that his posturing with black kids was a manifestation of white privilege…
Kosh chided me for not backing down from his condescension re his work with black youth and his praise of their handiwork…
I named five painters and he left OS in a huff..
My guess is that he is currently among the numbers of irredeemable Trump supporters who Kosh believes he can coax away from their racism and bigotry without requiring them to acknowledge and accept that the societal problems and issues exist…
His photos with black kids are analogous to Trump’s prominent, over-the-shoulder, headshots of the three or four black folks in attendance at his rallies…
I was teaching material from the ‘1619 Project’ before it became widely known as the ‘1619 Project’ and I am personally acquainted with some of the contributors, chief among them being Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Re the contents of our book: It is a completely different shared experience when read as a distilled compilation of the interactions we culled from the materials gleaned from the exchanges on OS.
You should get a copy, if for no other reason than as a momento of our experiences on OS…
11/23/2022 @ 7:47 am
Lol lol lol!! Ron, thanks (I think) for reminding us of his name, although I kind like calling him that guy. Also, for saying that he likely became a Trump voter. If he’s not a Trump voter, he prolly votes against immigrants on the ballot questions.
In response to his happy crafty children post, I said I was fluent in White and rudely translated it. Ron would have done it much better than I did, but he’s polite, maybe kinder. TM/TG always posted his art done twenty years earlier, but no recent or current work. He wouldn’t discuss contemporary artists or women artists, yet Ron wasn’t informed enough to discuss art with him! He would have had his butt handed to him on a palette at my workplace.
Ron, Gates was interviewed by Marc Maron on WTF podcast recently. Maron’s a terrific interviewer, and got interesting responses from Gates. He’s pretty much a rock star in my town. A LOT of people involved in 1619 project would will be new voices to you though. If you only read NHJ’s opening essay, the one that was in the original NYTimes Magazine, the one that got the Pulitzer, I think you’d report back that you had no socks on because they’d been knocked off. It’s not the book you think, or that I thought anyway, before I read it. It’s a giant compendium of many things. You might have knowledge of some and others not.
From the website:
“a collection of nonfiction, including essays from writers, academics, journalists, and historians exploring 18 different American institutions and phenomena: Democracy, Race, Sugar, Fear, Dispossession, Capitalism, Politics, Citizenship, Self-Defense, Punishment, Inheritance, Medicine, Church, Music, Healthcare, Traffic, Progress, and Justice. The collection also includes poems and short fiction.”
There’s a piece that is a letter written from a contemporary poet to an enslaved Black woman who wrote poetry and died age 33. It’s the place in the book I cried the hardest.
Both the Ken Burns doc and the NHJ project force you to consider how among the millions of lives taken, had they lived, many would have become poet laureates, scientists, doctors, leaders, artists, Nobel Peace Prize winners, etc. White people snuffed out healthier, safer, better lives for themselves, along with everyone else.
Taking off soon for Friendsgiving today, won’t be online much, so I wish you all a good one!
11/23/2022 @ 11:31 am
Thank you. Terry McKenna.
Of course he didn’t think White people should be held accountable for systemic racism. No one in the book’s target audience did. I think you misread him in a very fundamental way; I think both of you misread him in the same way.
He didn’t care what other people thought. That was obvious; he was aggressive about it. Criticize my language? Shove it, I don’t give a shit. If he was working with minority kids he wasn’t doing it to pander because he didn’t care enough about anyone to pander to them. Trump is a politician and a showman and cares very, very much what people think. That’s why he lies about the size of his crowds. If you find a guy like Terry who thinks the kids he worked with were given a raw deal and put in the effort to do something about it, you already know you have something to work with. The one thing I’m positive about when it comes to Terry is that he didn’t do it to impress you. He took the pictures because he was proud of doing the right thing. He should have been, it was a good thing. His peers weren’t. In his world this was an exception; that’s why he talked about it.
Suzanne,
Vocabulary. Yes, vocabulary. This is probably obvious to you but what language is commonly used differs drastically between a Northeastern college campus and a conservative New Jersey community full of older people and probably highly traditionally ethnic (meaning ethnic groups that have been here for a long time). I’m very familiar with the phenomenon. I spent my college years at Oberlin where PC was pervasive but didn’t yet have a name. It’s a terribly insular environment and what I encountered at home was radically different. Also, I don’t come from education, so my view of what was normal is a bit different. My father finished high school at night though no one who knew him would ever assume that. My mother was an adult college student, going back to school when I was in my early teens and she was a grad student while I was an undergrad. I did not get a graduate degree. I got out of college and went straight into a family business. I was on a campus where 2/3 of the students had seen psych services and at that age I wondered why the Hell they’d do that. In my world that was not normal. I don’t find Terry as alien as I think you do.
For what it was worth, most of my academic background was in sociology, and one of the things that was drummed into us was how difficult it is to do unbiased polling. You can take the same idea, express it in two different ways, and get vastly different results. Somebody who talks about feminazis can agree with the concept of equal pay for equal work. As a lifelong liberal I’ve watched this over and over and it drives me fucking nuts. I know a lot of people who are justice minded but absolutely can’t stand PC. They find PC to be linguistically dictatorial, don’t like to be pushed around, and don’t like assumptions made about them based on their language which in some academic environments is a constant. We’ve known guys like that in OS. The late Trig was a prime example, a blue collar guy who was proud of having a son in the military and believed strongly in justice. We lose elections by not acknowledging that and tapping into people who would normally be our allies but whom we instead alienate because we’re too self-righteous to understand our opportunities. See organized labor,.
Ron,
It makes no sense to write a book to reach an audience then to dismiss that audience in real life.
Of course the real reason I could take Terry is probably that I have a history since childhood of having difficult friends. I could always deal with them easily and navigate what it took. It’s a useful skill for dealing with the opposition. Perhaps most importantly I can do it without losing myself.
11/23/2022 @ 12:34 pm
We don’t know much about one another, do we? Thanks for the bit of back story.
Here’s a bit of mine. I grew up in Western PA, half an hour from the I-80 exit that for the entirety of the Obama years had a huge bill board that said ‘Show Us The Birth Certificate’. It remained pristine because no one defaced it, although on my night drives past, that was a personal fantasy. It was not taken down, not even after Obama left office. A few miles down the road, you could buy gas ammo and liquor, all in the same store. I know the language and also that TM leaned a little left for many of the neighbors.
I don’t agree abt his giving no shits. He seemed terribly insecure to me, a reason he posted all those ancient paintings from when he was in art school. Either there was no current work, or it was weak, and he knew that either he was not a practicing artist, or that he wasn’t very good. He used the connoisseur angle as a cover, same as Trump does.
I have to make the car go to CT but this. You like a human project, and you sincerely believe that you can change stubborn minds via careful explanation. I get this. My former hub was captain of his high school debate team, and saw debate as something someone wins. In our dozen years of arguing–sorry, debate–he always thought he won, as his points were so clearly made, so on point, so impenetrable. Did he ever once change my mind? Not to my recollection 🙂
Happy Thanksgiving! Give thanks that you won’t have to eat this macaroni and cheese I made.
11/23/2022 @ 8:58 pm
I was a debater but in discussions with guys like Terry – or with you for that matter – I don’t think of it in terms of winning. If someone feels like they lost I did it wrong. I’m trying to get at the truth, you’re trying to get at the truth, and we’re successful if we get there. Particularly in a topic like this, adversarial is exactly what doesn’t work. Adversarialism (?) makes people defensive and defensive people are less likely to change their minds because in order to do so they must somehow be humiliated. That’s a formula for failure. Again, that’s what the book was about, at least as I saw it at the time.
I don’t always change minds. However, if I’m online in a predominantly conservative group – I was in an online conversational group of some sort with Steel Breeze for a while, a guy I lost track of – I end up respected in that I’m obviously thinking and not knee-jerk. One of the best ways to build that is to make a mistake and own that more recent information has proven you wrong. I didn’t set that up but circumstances did that that helped me.
11/26/2022 @ 10:02 am
You are fortunate to have had a life of work that uses your persuasion skills. Although I enjoy verbal exchanges, my primary skill set is visual. There’s a NYorker cartoon pasted on my office door. It shows a long-haired bearded guy in bellbottoms and beads at a cocktail party, surrounded by guests in black tie. A woman in a long gown, hair up, glass of champagne stands next to him with an expectant look. The caption is “sorry I can’t carry on a conversation, I’m visual”.
I had fun blogging at Open Salon, it was such a bazaar of creative characters. I suspect we read different bloggers, as I seldom recognize the names you refer to. I still follow many on Instagram: Ann Nichols, Rose, Anna, Candace, Rita, Joanie H. After OS shut down, I blogged for a little at Our Salon, but lost interest. The practice of blogging in general seemed to disappear.
Although I’m not on any social media, I joined Instagram several years ago. A beloved former student was in a life threatening accident, in a coma for three months, rehab for over a year, and it was the only way to stay informed about him. Before Facebook bought it, Instagram was primarily creative people. Post Facebook, it became celebrity influencers and four ads to every post. I’ve opened it less and less this year as well, a reason why it was lovely get Alan’s heads up, and see Rose posting paintings that I’d already seen and hearted there, but here with additional insights.
These days, I keep the laptop downstairs on the kitchen counter while I’m in the studio. It’s incredible how much I get done. I’ve become progressively more aware of the brevity of remaining years, that right now I’m making the best work I’ll ever make, for who knows how much longer. These words I’m typing, eh. Time to go upstairs and start pushing the pencil around.
Re: instagram. I’m @frannybeaks if you are there too, stop by. Avatar is that of my bird companion, Miss Franny Beaks, studio mate and muse, who passed away last year at age thirty.
11/23/2022 @ 1:31 am
“Racism is typically a White phenomenon, not a Black one.”
—–Koshersalaami
Terry McKenna would vehemently argue this point to the contrary….
Koshersalaami could never have won him over with his persuasive ‘sales pitch’.
11/23/2022 @ 7:59 am
One time at the original OS I said that this was whites’ original sin, and got slammed. Although I’m not religious, the concept of original sin is intriguing. It was conceived by humans who must have been aware that what they were doing would become a burden to be borne by humans who came after them, perhaps forever. It’s such a blame game practice, i.e. original sin is something ‘god’ placed on us, rather than something we did to ourselves.
11/23/2022 @ 1:54 am
Does anyone remember this bit of Trump racist hypocrisy?:
11/23/2022 @ 8:07 am
A fan! A great guy! Please die a horrible death
So Ron, aware that you do not speak for all Black people, what is up with those Blacks For Trump??
11/23/2022 @ 8:57 am
“…what is up with those Blacks For Trump??”
Suzanne:
Stupid is as stupid does!
11/23/2022 @ 10:32 am
I feel rather prescient at the moment.
I always thought the use of one’s real name on sites like this opened up one to the possibility of being maligned later without any chance for defense.
I was correct.
11/23/2022 @ 11:34 am
If we’re talking about Mr. McKenna I am absolutely defending him but you are still correct.
11/23/2022 @ 12:25 pm
I see that now, but not before I posted. Thank you for that much.
It is quite disconcerting to see so many self-aggrandizing statements elsewhere in this thread, but not unexpected.
11/30/2022 @ 1:19 pm
Golly-molly! Divide and conquer! PC-Mag has a frozen page, as I ‘tempted to hone-down learn’ about Instagram’s suspect superpower usury. Quid pro quo as the flowers grow …. One would suppose, say, that Hawaii will burst into flames. Wait, say it ain’t so! Next thing you know, Joe DiMaggio exits. I close my eyes … asperand …comment draft … deploy that life raft … purple prose … that heavy parlor book … ok all that French I took
01/12/2023 @ 3:59 pm
When I get this LO;} I sometimes spin or view and listen to JFK’s inaguration speech.
Alsoul hath anyone noticed that our peace sign is a Y encircled?
01/13/2023 @ 10:20 am
Not quite a Y.
The peace sign is part of my avatar. It is overlaid on a star of David. I.e. kosher, Salaam.
04/17/2023 @ 3:35 pm
This thread has shamed me. Where was I when all this was going on?