Maat's Feather - Recent Comments

Bianca here...

biancagirl — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 14:29:28 GMT

Thanks a lot for the very informative and straightforward post. I like the idea of Fax less payday loans to lessen the hassle. Please keep posting amazing articles... More power!

Sigh.

Maryscott O'Connor — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 16:00:57 GMT

Aren't there enough of us (and by "us," I mean at least SEMI-enlightened white people) out here to support a real change?

When, for the love of god, can we stop pussy-footing around the real issues and speak the truths that matter? And refuse to allow them to be batted back down because they make some -- or, a lot of the time, MANY -- people uncomfortable. Jimmy Carter tried -- and Obama and Clinton were the primary enablers of the stiflers, the "hush, now, we don't want to talk about that" crowd. The Big Dog and the President Himself, because that's what we've always done, to make everybody feel safe and comfortable and secure: "It's okay, we don't have to talk about race, we don't have to confront this issue, we can let the wind take care of it like it's taken care of the Grand Canyon."

But goddamnit, we don't have TIME, and the Grand Canyon didn't have a force in nature actively working against its creation. Racism's eradication, something the "it will happen naturally in time" crowd want us to WAIT for, is actively worked against by not just people from generations that are dying off, but people from their progeny, whom they have schooled in their racism, and whose own progeny will further be schooled, and on and on it will continue, unless and until someone breaks into their idyll of hate with the jarring but necessary insistence on talking about this shit.

Shanikka, I dunno if you stop by here often enough to read this in any timely fashion, so I'm going to reprint this at MLW, somewhere relevant...

Thanks!

OhCrapIHaveACrushOnSarahPalin — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:15:48 GMT

Thank you Shanikka for this fantastic take-apart of the absurd anti-Black hysteria, and debunking this "70% of black people" b.s.

Glad it Got Straightened Out

Shanikka — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 13:53:46 GMT

I was confused since I've not had any reason to ban anyone -- indeed as MSOC noted, I've been largely an absentee landlord here for months due to work!

We all Have Housecleaning to Do

Shanikka — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 13:52:14 GMT

And although I'm now in a world of hurt work-wise because of it, I think I'm going to try today to write about why I do think that Black homophobia exists to a degree that it does not in other demographics (even if it decidedly is NOT 70% of Black folks hatin') and outline at least some initial steps that all of us need to take to try and right this wrong.

Each one, reach one, after all.

Thank you

sophiemn — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:15:36 GMT

This is my sanity today. Bi, poly, man-partnered and white girl here, but I've been completely horrifed by what I'm hearing and seeing from the mainstream of the community. We have got to get our own house in order before we're going to be able to move forward, and it's got to be inclusive, responsive, and earnestly embracing GLBT people of color. If this "screw 'em after all I did for 'em" attitude is all we've got in the service of the civil rights and concerns of POC, well, that's nothing. Nothing at all. I'm ashamed and ill. Thanks for doing the data work on this too.

Also...

Esquire — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:11:34 GMT

I linked to you from my site. I have been debating this in my little circle on the web and hope to raise more awareness. Again, beautiful job.

Great Post

Esquire — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:09:39 GMT

I saw this over at the Daily Kos and thought it was excellent.

superb

diane w — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:56:56 GMT

I just went back to waitressing to survive. One of my co-workers in an young 20 something mother who lives in this area, a almost (previously) exclusively racist neo-con, red as hell area.

She and I talk a little about Politics when we can... but today, today I had to say to her how excited... no absolutely wired I was that finally she, her babies, her Momma will get to see someone who looks like her run this country.

I had to explain to my son whaw it would be like if he never saw a white guy or woman almost EVER was the boss of anything, let alone our country.

It is time for Americans to demand competence, no longer stand for idiot because they are good old boys to run our lives. Hire intelligence no matter what the color. But it is also time for white privileged folks to realized a man of color is their better. Their Better, all aound period.

I pray the racists after a few months, realizing that blacks are not going to come kill them enmasse, make overdue paybacks... and suddenly their schools are better, their wallets thicker, war over.... they will lose their fear of "other" ness and wake the fuck up.

This is trancendental, this is HUGE.

I so want this, I cannot breathe.

I came slowly to Obama, for politicians have to prove themselves to me.

He passed.

He stood.

He has integrity and is, if not a Conyers, a man who has our best interests at heart.

If they steal this, I will be at war with the ones who did it.

I would be eternally grateful if you would cross post this, this once, even bustya as you are to The Wild Wild Left.

You speak for those I cannot speak for, and speak words I cannot know from my sheltered life.

Help them get it.

it musta glitched

diane w — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:44:55 GMT

I used the same code today as yesterday... I want you to know I check this blog often, and this essay so struck me it infiltrated a dream I had.

Beautifully done, Just carefully respectfully and beautifully done.

Thank You Very Much

Shanikka — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:50:55 GMT

For posting this diary and story here, which I had not heard of perhaps because I've just been running around like the proverbial headless chicken for more than a year. Do you have a link to the story? I'd like to read more about it.

In the end, I like to think that the law of Ma'at is, ultimately, similar to the law of karma. Those that would stone a child to death for being a victim of gendered violence are not acting in the sense of either "the law" or justice. Of course, that does not excuse us all from our duty to fight this type of thing, loudly (and I like you am often "in the face" of those who are behaving in a manner that I think is wrong, so don't put yourself down there.)

I'm not sure how old you are and I don't want to presume, but speaking only for myself I found that over the decades, my ever-present rage at the things that enraged me -- racism, sexism, economic exploitation, the poor, you name it -- shifted in character from an all-consuming barely controlled emotion to one that I use as constructively as possible. In other words, time itself shows that anger, that does not ultimately translate itself into reflection and development of inner peace, doesn't get us the change we want. Do I mean "stop being angry?" Hell no - the Aisha's of the world deserve our righteous rage on their behalf and too few of us show that as it is. Rather, what I am trying to say is "let your fire burning in your belly be like the pilot light on a stove: capable of giving you energy to work, to write, to tell stories, to build coalition, to do your own part in the fight, whether it's in your face with those who do wrong, or a more subtle approach.

Peace and thanks again for posting this.

Some Thoughts about Reparations

LVTfan — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 19:18:14 GMT

I've gone through some of the thought processes you've described, and want to share my thoughts about reparations. Here's the really short version, which I'll expand on.

Were we to summon the political will and all that it would take to decide to do reparations, I predict that the effects of doing so, under our current way of doing things, would be that 20 years down the road, not all that many of the children of those who received reparations would be in college or have graduated from college than would have otherwise been in college, BUT that a lot more of the children of those who at the time the reparations were distributed were the owners of well-located pieces of land WOULD be college educated and perhaps without debt.

As we conduct ourselves right now, the ultimate beneficiary of nearly any public spending or healthy economy is the fellow who owns a good piece of land. His land rises in value, whether he has put a building on it or not. Every one of us needs land, whether it be for a place to work or a place to live, or both. Most of us work on land far more valuable than the land we can afford to live on. If we don't own a piece of land, we must pay someone who does for the right to a bit of it. Even if we legally have title to the land, we may, for 30 years, be paying off the last fellow who owned that piece of land -- and we're usually paying him a lot more than he paid for it some years earlier. But he didn't make that land valuable -- the community did! But we pay him, as if he had created the value, and are then indentured to the mortgage lender for decades to reimburse the purchase price. We can choose which master -- lender -- we pay, and we may be able to get a slightly better interest rate, but we are indentured nonetheless.

Let's say that we come around to agreeing that every individual in America who can prove that they descended from at least one person enslaved in this country is entitled to, say, $100,000. The $100,000 checks are distributed. (We'll put aside the question of how they are financed.) What happens next?

That $100,000 gives to each recipient major spending power. Overnight, the price of housing will rise. People who have been vaguely thinking about moving will put their homes on the market, and start looking at where else they'd like to live. People with housing to rent will spruce it up and put it on the market. People with some extra land available will decide that their ship has come in, and offer it up for sale. But none of the asking prices will be at the levels that prevailed before the reparations were agreed to. The prices will rise to take into account the awesome spending power that the $100,000 checks provide.

Who will benefit? Not the recipients of the checks. Their cost of living will have risen. Not their age-mates and neighbors who rent and didn't receive checks. They will be spending a lot more of their income just to house themselves in this market, and will likely be bitter. All the young people who still need to find housing before they have children will find themselves in a very sad holding pattern.

The beneficiaries will be those with land to sell. Twenty years after the checks are issued, no larger a share of those who received checks will be in college or through college. But those who already owned land, and their children, will be the big winners.

HOW DO WE FIX THIS, so that reparations would be a windfall for all? By changing what we tax. If we placed our main taxation on land value -- not houses, not buildings, not pools or other improvements, just land value -- and taxed heavily the annual value of our land, we-the-people -- all of us, whether recipient or not -- woungld benefit from this.

The story is similar re: women's large-scale entry into the workforce in the 1970s. Suddenly these one-income families became two-income families, with a lot more money to spend on housing. This forced others into the workplace who might have chosen to stay home with their children while kids were young; they no longer had as much choice, if they wanted to be able to afford homes in good school districts. (It also served to bring wages down, but that's another story.) It also doomed a lot of single-parent families to districts with inferior schools; a single income just isn't enough to afford a toehold in a good school district.

There's nothing new about this. Winston Churchill described it in a series of 1909 speeches. (See http://www.wealthandwant.com/d...

I've digressed, but the topic is more closely related to Mr. Blackmon's topic than might immediately be obvious. We continue to perpetuate a form of slavery today. Our country's wealth is concentrated into the portfolios of the top 1% of us -- they have 33% of the wealth -- and the next 4%, who have another 24% of the wealth. And the people who control 1% of the wealth get a pretty big share of our reported income -- about 14%, as do the folks who control that next 4% of wealth. The rest of us spend large percentages of our income on housing ourselves - and I'm not talking about McMansions; most of the cost, at least in the major metro areas along our coasts, is payment for the land value, not the building.

Explore http://www.answersanswers.com/ for more about these ideas, or http://www.wealthandwant.com/.

Indeed I have been

Shanikka — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:22:16 GMT

I could spend hours talking about why -- at least some of it is loss of voice, for now, as I contemplate so many things in the future and feel that at this time in Black history they would be utterly unappreciated as expressed sentiments, but some is simply an overwhelming work load.

Yet that is why I left folks like you, and Lilian and others, with front page rights. Since this was never intended to be just my soapbox, but a forum where folks could discuss.

I'll be back when I can.

In the interim, I have read this brilliant piece twice over the past three days and I reiterate what I have always said: you get it.

Peace.

shanikka, you are an absentee landlord!

Maryscott O'Connor — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:38:27 GMT

br>
Ah, well. Figured it was appropriate.

Some of the linked comments

spit — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:10:22 GMT

are... well, I wish they were more jaw-dropping. They're something.

I guess these shootings will always be "justified" in the minds of many so long as essentially "I got nervous" is seen as a perfectly acceptable reason for a cop to fill any Black man with bullets.

I wish I understood how to get more people to really, honestly understand that it's a piece of privilege to feel that the police are there to provide protection for you instead of from you. That's what those comments make me think.

God damn. "Not believable".