Some time ago I saw a comedy sketch by Richard Pryor in which he held a press conference to announce to the police and residents of Beverly Hills that early the next morning he would be going jogging along the streets. Like much of Pryor’s humor, it had a sharp edge, highlighting the fact that a black man running in a predominantly white neighborhood tends to alarm people.

Is such a reaction racist? The Crommunist Manifesto reflects on this question using his own personal experiences as a black man who also has to take precautions so that people are not alarmed by his presence. Most people do not realize that black men routinely make an extra effort to make those around them feel comfortable in their presence. You can imagine how unpleasant it must be for people to feel that they have to constantly prove to others that their presence is benign.

It reminded me of an experience that I had written about a couple of years ago about the role of race and class in society, and how people like me benefit from it. Here is a pertinent excerpt from that post.

I recall once a conference presentation in a hotel meeting room that I made together with my African-American female colleague. After our session, we cleared up and took our stuff out to make room for the next presenters. I picked up what I thought was my colleague’s expensive-looking coat (she is always well dressed) but it was only later after relaxing in the lobby and getting ready to go home that she said that the coat did not belong to her and I realized that it must belong to the people who had been setting up after us. Her boyfriend was also present and he started to take the coat back to the room to return it, but then stopped and asked if I could do it because he said that it would be awkward for him to do so as people ‘might not understand’. The problem was as clear as it was unspoken. It did not matter that he is a very distinguished-looking and impeccably dressed man who could easily be mistaken for an ambassador or college president, while I was my usual nondescript self. The basic fact was that he is black and I am not, and that made all the difference in whether we would be presumed guilty or innocent of theft.

Crommunist’s post is very thoughtful and well worth reading.

In response to my earlier post condemning the murder of the Iranian scientist as an act of terrorism, one commenter posed a serious objection that calls for a detailed response that I thought merited a new post in its own right.

To equate the Iranian weapons scientists assassinations with the equivalent against the US or Israel is silly. Neither the US nor Israel has threatened to destroy Iran simply because it exists. In addition, most of the world feels that Iran getting a nuclear weapon is A Really Bad Thing.

In short: If you were Israel (or the US, for that matter), what’s the alternative, assuming sanctions won’t work? This Administration has narrowed its demands on Iran to a much greater degree than the previous, drawing the line at a nuclear weapon (rather than previously with enrichment et al). Which is one of the reasons most of the rest is going along with the sanctions to one degree or another.

I assume that you would not have been opposed to assassinations against WWII Germany or Japan (and we conducted them, to be sure; the most noteworthy being Yamamoto). Yet when we’re talking nukes, you can’t wait until the war has started. So, again…..what’s your alternative?

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To commemorate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I am linking to a post I wrote on this occasion in 2008 that tried to expose readers to the fact that towards the end of his life, King was actively campaigning against a wide range of injustices, not just racial ones.

People sometimes forget that he was widely read in politics, economics, history, and philosophy and used all of them in his writings, especially the later ones, to forcefully make the case for justice.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley has been on a tear recently. His recent op-ed in the Washington Post lists ten reasons why the US should no longer consider itself the land of the free.

While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.

Just go down the list to see how the bogus ‘war on terror’ waged by both Bush/Cheney and Obama has been used to steadily strip away all the protections that used to be considered sacrosanct. It is both shocking and depressing.

Glenn Greenwald uses the recent murder of an Iranian scientist to meticulously document how the word terrorism has been drained of any objective meaning and has become a propaganda term to be used only to describe acts that are taken against the interests of the US and Israel. If the US and Israel commit such acts, or are even suspected of doing so, then the loaded word is scrupulously avoided and euphemisms substituted, such as the more clinical ‘targeted assassination’.
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Matt Taibbi’s articles in Rolling Stone and his blog are essential reading for those wanting to know about the financial shenanigans that have rocked the country, and the excesses of Wall Street executives.

In a blog post with the above title, he provides yet another example of both aspects.

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoners at Guantanamo, brought there on military transport planes, shackled hand-to-waist, waist-to-ankles, their ankles bolted on the airplane floor, their ears and eyes goggled and their heads hooded. Glenn Greenwald describes how over that period, the principles of justice have been steadily subverted, first by Bush/Cheney and now by Obama, resulting in nightmarish treatment of people becoming routine.

It is worth reading the accounts of two of the people who were detained for long periods in Guantanamo.
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Last week Stephen Colbert had a good segment that dealt with the National Defense Authorization Act that Congress and the White House rushed through during the holiday season with little or no discussion of its dangerous features. I wrote before about how it authorizes the military to detain anyone to be held indefinitely without trial.

The New York Times an interesting profile of Colbert and a look behind the scenes of his show.

Iranian nuclear scientists are getting murdered, the latest case being reported today. Glenn Greenwald asks the right question: Why is this not denounced here as terrorism?

Does anyone doubt that some combination of the two nations completely obsessed with Iran’s nuclear program — Israel and the U.S. — are responsible? (U.S. officials deny involvement while pointing the finger at Israel, whose officials will not comment but “smile” when asked; the CIA has “targeted” Iran’s scientists in the past, several of whom have disappeared only to end up in U.S. custody, including one who “resurfaced in the United States after defecting to the CIA in return for a large sum of money”). At the very least, there has been no denunciation from any Obama officials of whoever it might be carrying out such acts.