Life for a Black person in America, from Chris Rock

Saw this post about Chris Rock's race-relations campaigning and couldn't help but share my favourite take-aways:

There’s like three or four black people in my neighbourhood in Alpine. It’s me, Gary Sheffield, Mary J. Blige, and Patrick Ewing. Hall of Famer, Hall of Famer, greatest R&B singer of all-time, decent comedian. Who lives next to me? What’s the white man next to me? He’s a dentist. He didn’t invent anything. He’s just a dentist.

…

Just when you let Jackie Robinson in baseball, that doesn’t mean it’s equal. Baseball, statistically, isn’t equal almost until the 70s. And, you know, and why do I say the 70s? ‘Cause that’s when you started to see bad black baseball players. The true, true equality is to be able to suck like the white man. That’s really Martin Luther King’s dream coming true: it’s guys sucking. I watch the Oscars, okay these are the people that made the good movies, what about the people that made the bad movies? That’s most of the industry. I want to be like that. Not that I want to be bad, but I want a license to be bad and come back… and learn.

I also really liked this bit on gendered-race-relations:

The thing the black culture's missing, it's not the comedian thing, somebody will be that guy. The real question is, when are one of these black girls going to get their Streisand on? It's like 'Yo, I'm really about to set it off, I'm writing a movie, I'm directing a movie, I'm star of the movie. I can't wait to meet her. I can't wait to work with her. I can't wait until I meet the female Tyler Perry, that's going to be the next level.

Where in the world is Vladimir Putin?

 

Courtesy of Ted McCagg/The Monkey Cage

50th Anniversary of the first march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama

Of the several "50th Anniversary's" occurring this year, the remembrance of the bravery and commitment of the roughly 600 Alabama citizens and supporters who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, despite high levels of violence, in peaceful pursuit of basic human dignity is extremely important and deservedly commemorated. The marches from Selma to Montgomery were one giant step in a long march towards freedom for people suffering around the world. 

Indeed my own brief confusion about today's news coverage stems from the fact that the phrase "Bloody Sunday" is more often attributed to a very different display of violence in Northern Ireland. Different, yes, and yet also a circumstance of citizens desperately seeking freedom from fear and access to equal rights and human dignity. Citizens who were inspired by the people of Alabama and across America.

This link will take you to the pre-prepared transcript of President Obama's speech in Selma earlier today, which I believe he delivered quite well. CNN: President Obama's remarks at #Selma50

We should never forget the struggle of those who have fought for the freedoms we have come to enjoy, or even demand, and we should never forget that this struggle is ongoing.

Some excerpts:

"We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, that racial division is inherent to America. If you think nothing's changed in the past 50 years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or Los Angeles of the 1950s. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing's changed. Ask your gay friend if it's easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress, this hard-won progress --- our progress --- would be to rob us of our own agency, our own capacity, our responsibility to do what we can to make America better."
...
"We know the march is not yet over. We know the race is not yet won. We know that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged, all of us, by the content of our character requires admitting as much, facing up to the truth. "We are capable of bearing a great burden," James Baldwin once wrote, "once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.""

#Selma50