why we are like we are

I've been spending lots of time in the blogosphere lately, though reading rather than contributing. My two current favorites/obsessions: The Black Commentator and Angry Black Bitch. Brilliant stuff. Yeah, okay, and celeb blogs, though mostly I've been engrossed in the occasional flare-ups of something-close-to-substance on Concrete Loop, Crunk and Disorderly, and Cake and Ice Cream--recent popular threads regarding homosexuality, interracial relationships, pedophilia, black male demonization, etc. It can be very enlightening/sobering/depressing/sickening to read how the rest of America's bored employees really think on these issues.

Mostly, though, the bloggers and their fans have been saying it all and I don't feel a need to comment, but one of the stories on Black Commentator this week really resonated: "Nazi Ties, Grave Robbing, and the Bush Family" by Margaret Kimberley. In it, she references a story about how George Bush's grandfather, among other things, robbed Geronimo's grave of his skull and bones, looting them for the Skull and Bones society at Yale. Straight from CBS news, so, mainstream. Now, I occasionally go off to Deirdre about white Americans' pathology, and how one of the reasons for many of this country's ills is not that we haven't collectively dealt with how slavery and racism has affected black people, but that white Americans can't even acknowledge the deep pathology of their historic behavior to even begin to deal with a culture that, in Kimberley's words, finds it "amusing [not only] to desecrate a grave but to take the bones and use them in bizarre rituals to cement their claims to privilege;" rather routinely sexually mutilates, hangs, and burns men because of their skin color; or systematically rapes women they supposedly don't regard as human (worse if they do) in order to generate a free labor force/wealth. By comparison, black folks have it easy. I'd much rather have an ancestor in chains (though I surely have some ancestors who were rapists) than to have one who would put another human being in those chains.