Is Howard Schultz Gearing Up for a Run?

Dear Starbucks Friend and Fellow Citizen:


I love our country. And I am a beneficiary of the promise of America. But today, I am very concerned that at times I do not recognize the America that I love.


Like so many of you, I am deeply disappointed by the pervasive failure of leadership in Washington. And also like you, I am frustrated by our political leaders' steadfast refusal to recognize that, for every day they perpetuate partisan conflict and put ideology over country, America and Americans suffer from the combined effects of paralysis and uncertainty. Americans can't find jobs. Small businesses can't get credit. And the fracturing of consumer confidence continues.


We are better than this.

Battery Stroll

Pacific Northwest Whitewash

"Trying to describe white privilege to white people is like trying to explain water to a fish."


Bonita Appleblog crafted an excellent, thoughtful response to an article in Seattle's alt-weekly, The Stranger, on racism, Seattle-style.


Fact!  I used to live in Seattle.  I went to college there, and I cannot recall interacting with a single black person outside of the Supersonics, Monday night Seahawks hangout at the jazz club, the 3 guys on our school's basketball team, and the neighborhoods where I volunteered.  OUCH.


These days, the first reason I give when asked if I would ever move back to Portland and I say no and they ask why, is that it's not diverse enough.  People like to debate this, or act like this is an unreasonable dealbreaker, but when you grow up as a mixed-race kid in a superwhite area, you're not in a big hurry to return to a place where you didn't stand a chance of blending in, being beautiful, encountering others like you.


This explanation is inevitably met with a blank stare, which brings us back to the quote at the top of this post. Rinse, repeat.


"Your life story produces a racial filter," [explains Tali Hairston.] "It might be a lens so thick that everything gets drawn into looking like it's about race, or so thin that when someone says something is racial, you go, oh hell no, it's not. As a white person, you have to own the development of your own racial lens. Because whether you're aware of it or not, you have one."

The Politics of Black Pregnancy

Hide your kids, hide your wife - Beyonce is pregnant!  OMG who cares that she's one of the most talented and accomplished pop performers in American history -- drooooollllllllbbaaaaaaaaabbbbbbbyyyyyyy!!!!  Let the tabloids rejoice!

Awesome discussion happening in the comments over at my favorite Jezebel about the ridiculousness of this being a "statement" or example for The Black Community, a lesson for black single mothers on how to do things The Right Way.*

Sigh.

Loved this comment in particular:

Honestly, me and my sister were more surprised that Jay-Z was "doing it the right way". When we read about it, the article said it would be the first child for Jay-Z at 41 years old, and we were amazed that a 41 year old rapper had yet to father children. Sure we knew before that he wasn't toting kids, but to have it laid out like that made it clear to us how unusual it seemed for a black man his age (and income bracket) not to have kids all over the place. We even expected it. Sometimes it can seem that for a black man to have multiple "baby mamas" is a status symbol in itself- it either means that he's got enough cash to support them all, or he's got enough game to get them all in the first place. If I recall correctly, Clutch even wrote an article on the whole "I wanna get you pregnant" phenomenon. So yeah, I'm more surprised that all the hoopla is about Beyonce "doing it the right way" when Jay-Z "doing it the right way" seems like a far better example to be pushing in the black community. 


*Be born to  ambitious stage parents, have ridiculous talent, achieve fame in teen years, have long career, marry billionaire, become pregnant.

Republicans Raising Taxes?! Oh, Wait.

In a decade of frenzied tax-cutting for the rich, the Republican Party just happened to lower tax rates for the poor, as well. Now several of the party’s most prominent presidential candidates and lawmakers want to correct that oversight and raise taxes on the poor and the working class, while protecting the rich, of course.


Full article.

New York Needs to Bring It Down a Notch

I'm glad to have been out of NYC during Irene if only to realize how awfully self-absorbed we/NYC can be.

Instead of snarking that the storm didn't hit the city hard or complaining about lack of transit, everyone should take a minute to reflect on those who weren't so lucky and be humbly grateful.

Start with this slideshow
Or this article

Just because it doesn't happen to New York doesn't mean it doesn't happen.  And matter.

Everyone Stop Telling Me To See "The Help"

I don't want to see that movie.  I don't want to read the book.  I haven't been articulating why very well, I just get an icky feeling from the commercial with the worn-out types: Sassy Black Maid, Hoity-Toity White Upper Class Lady, Sympathetic White Woman Who Will Turn Out Okay.  The white-person-as-hero feel-good flick that glosses over a host of problems that one person ain't solving is not my genre, which is also why I will not waste two hours on The Blind Side, not that I need a reason beyond Sandra Bullock (though Crash was awesome, and imho her only watchable moment).

This op-ed makes a related point:

To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not.

Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud. It’s the fallacy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.

But that wasn’t the case...

...Cultures function and persist by consensus. In Jackson and other bastions of the Jim Crow South, the pervasive notion, among poor whites and rich, that blacks were unworthy of full citizenship was as unquestioned as the sanctity of church on Sunday. “The Help” tells a compelling and gripping story, but it fails to tell that one.

Stuck

So, yes, I blog less when I have more work to do.

But lately, I've also been hesitant to post because I have been reducing my news consumption, which makes me feel less capable of posting a remotely intelligent commentary on anything going on. [insert joke in the vein of "well that never stopped you before!" har har.]

In other words, there have been lots of things I want to bring up but haven't felt like I can form a succinct post/argument/narrative/story.  But my thoughts and feelings on the things - political, cultural, etc - that I am pondering are strong, and worth pointing out.

Then I realized: maybe the point is just to raise some questions.

Let's give it a try...

In Which The New York Times Prints That Printable Matter is Unprintable... Again.

[part where I apologize for being scarce by validate it by explaining once again that this just means I'm busy with work, so it's good thing]

Not once but twice in last Sunday's Arts & Leisure section, the NYTimes repeated my favorite of its ridiculous policies - instead of printing perfectly printable words, ie the title of the marvelous Broadway play The Motherfucker with the Hat (see it!), it censors itself/its interviewee by glazing over whatever was obviously said by saying it's unprintable.  Once toward the end of an article about Andrew Lloyd Webber (which should be unprintable since his recent work is unlistenable), and then by calling Cee-Lo's marvelous song "Forget You," which has become the acceptable title, which is stupid.

As I've explained before, this drives me batshit fucking crazy.  Because it's untrue.  These words can be printed - look!  I just did it myself with a free blogging platform! So really it's just their (understandable) policy not to print them.  So that's how they should phrase it.  Or!  Have a New York People Who Can Handle Language version of the paper, and another Ultra Conservative And Worried About Superficial Societal Problems Like "Bad" Words version for whoever is writing in a blog that's the polar opposite of this one.

Also in the Arts section, Justin Timberlake.  Love.  And I don't even want to make out with him, I just want to go see dance movies together.  I mean, it's about time You Got Served had a sequel, amIright???

Apparently, the World is Ending Tomorrow...

... at 6pm, by the way.

What, you didn't hear?!  Oh, it's all over the place, even in the New York Times!  Like, see, this guy Harold Camping? He taught himself the Bible? And decided the world would obv start ending Saturday May 21 at 6pm with the rapture of all the Christians and then the rest of us/you would be left to, like, endure five months of plagues and stuff.  Gross!

This whole world-ending-tomorrow thing is throwing me for a loop.  I mean, I have so many questions that no one is answering!

• Am I going to be raptured if I was "saved" or "born again" as a child, but no longer practice Christianity in the traditional sense?
• Should I cancel my date for tomorrow night, or at least inform my poor suitor that I may not show up for our 9pm reservation because I'll have floated up to heaven 3 hours prior?
• Do I get points for acts of goodness, like the cat I saved from a raccoon trap yesterday?  (And by "save" I mean found and told someone else about who did the actual releasing from said trap?)
• Do I get extra points for acts of goodness that would probably be considered more Christian by Camping & Co, like when I handed out flyers condemning abortion in 4th grade?  Thanks for letting me do that, parents!
• What about acts of goodness that hearken back to what the Bible actually talks about Jesus doing and telling people to do, like when I volunteer or donate to those in need, or you know, show love and kindness to people whether I want to or not?  Doesn't count because I don't go to church though right?
• I'm registered as a Democrat, is that going to hold me up at heaven's security gate?
• Should I write a quick will and some goodbye emails or will it just be total chaos anyway, nullifying legal contracts and Google accounts?
• If all my dreams come true in heaven, can all my pagan friends join me?

I need answers, people, and for some reason, none of the doomsayers are bothering to tell me!

Because let's be honest: these people do not a) believe the world is ending and that they are really being raptured tomorrow, or, more to my point, b) give a shit about anyone else (the Bible refers to this as loving others as you love yourself; the American Christians often translate this to trying to save non-believers).

Because if a) were the case, they would be going way more crazy and being way less or way more responsible in these final days.  If you really, truly thought you had 24 hours left on this earth, what would you be doing with your time?  Surely not reading this blog, for starters.

And if b) were the case, they wouldn't be walking past me on the street with just a tee shirt and a smug look.  They would be begging, pleading, crying, not sleeping, to save everyone they love and probably everyone else they could possibly talk to from the horrible alternate, permanent fate.

Because, let's be honest: this is all a marketing campaign for FamilyRadio.com.  So, as a fellow marketer, I will hand it to Harold Camping for his brilliant strategy to get tons of free advertising and publicity and new audiences.  But as far as marketing ethics are concerned, I hope that as of 6pm tomorrow, he's indeed not heard from again.

I Have Read Some Obituaries With Joy...

Mixed Race on the Brian Lehrer Show

My favorite radio show is having a call-in right now on being mixed race - I can't get through so I will blog about it instead.  Apologies in advance for the stream of consciousness.

Click on multiracial on the tag cloud at right or search "mixed" to see my previous musings on being more than one race.

While I appreciate the guests - an interracial couple, I'd like to hear from a mixed race "expert" instead - but that would defeat the purpose of understanding since any one person's experience can't possibly capture it for us all.

You know where being mixes sucks these days?  Dating.  White guys are like "I don't date black women."  I don't know how someone can say this and not feel they're being racist and vastly generalizing (ahem, John Mayer, whose songs I have deleted from my iTunes after his extremely racist and insensitive comments about interracial dating).  And black men do not know what to do with me.

Last week I went to my friend Santana's play reading - she wrote a one-woman show about her experience growing up mixed called "The Other Box."  It was brilliant.  I didn't expect it to be that good this early in development.  But we have some uncommon parallels in our childhood & experience, so it was very hard for me to absorb at points.  The show is going up this month, happy to share info, it is so worth seeing -- you'll laugh and cry and get it.

Woman on radio now is talking about how it's more of an issue in New York.  This is so true.  Of course I was a kid on the West Coast so I may not have been as aware, but I will tell you that in NYC everyone needs to fit everyone else into a box, and it can really suck.  Of course, this is true way beyond race: your job, your neighborhood, your money, your family, your alma mater, your marital status, your hobbies, etc etc.

And.... segment over!  Seriously, I could explore this all the time.  Maybe I will start my own radio show just about being mixed and America from a mixed perspective.  Why not, every other racial group has their own media microcosm.  Take that, Brian Lehrer!