thomasjasengardner Wednesday, November 25, 2009
2148 words
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Diabetes enslaves blacks
A frightful hobgoblin stalks African-Americans. Diabetes is to blacks, is like concentration camps were to Jews, the potato blight to Irish and like slavery was to Africans. The number of African-Americans who die from obesity and diabetes are being exterminated by what Michael Pollen, author of In Defense of Food, calls ‘fake food.” The lack of vitamins, nutrients and anti-oxidants from a food diet is responsible for high blood pressure, heart attacks, and diabetes in black Americans. Is malnutrition in blacks, a conspirator death keel by government, food processors and healthcare workers?
Since affordable health care is out of reach for 30-40 million Americans, let us not aggravate death by diabetes. Obesity and diabetes is a direct result from consuming starchy, sugary, salty processed food of the western American diet. Pollen writes that Dr. Denis Burkitt believes the answer to good health is straightforward. “The only way we’re going to reduce disease is to go backwards to the diet and lifestyle of our ancestors,” he said (Pollen, p. 142). Diabetes disease drastically increases the risk of heart attack, stroke, blindness, kidney failure and amputation.
Non-food disguised as food, is contributing to the early death of minorities. When non-food products as Kellogg’s Fruit Loops get the governments seal of good health, this is done in conjunction with food scientists, government nutritionists, and corporate sponsors, Pollen said at UW Kohl Center in a lecture to attendees. The epidemic of obesity and diabetes, according to Pollen, is because of the dramatic consumption of polyunsaturated fats, profitable processed foods, and junk food designed as health food. “The nutritionist enlists the medical establishment and the government in the promotion of fake food,” he said.
The consequences of the western food diet has given African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Mexican-Americans with a higher then average rate of chronic heart disease, kidney failure, high blood pressure, and obesity. Wisconsin has the 25th highest percent of obese adults and the 12th of obese children according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Trust for America’s Health. Two-thirds of of Wisconsin’s African-Americans are obese. CDC reported in 2007 that diabetes from obesity was the fifth main killer of blacks. It lays between unintentional deaths and homicides on the list of genocide methods attributed to black deaths.
National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse reports that diabetes was the seventh leading cause of black deaths listed on U.S. death certificates in 2006. Their ranking is based on 20 percent or 72,507 death certificates in 2006. The disease contributed to 233,619 deaths in 2005, the latest year for which all data on causes of death are available.
In 2005, 23.3 out of every adult 100,000 deaths in Wisconsin was due to diabetes. In 2005, 256,000 Wisconsin adults were diagnosed with diabetes and by 2007, 7% of the total adult population had been diagnosed with diabetes.
Overweight and Obesity Rates for Adults by Race/Ethnicity, 2008
WI
% US
%
White 61.3% 59.6%
Black 62.1% 69.9%
Hispanic NSD 62.1%
Asian/Pacific Islander NSD 38.7%
American Indian/Alaska Native 70.2% 67.1%
Other 56.0% 59.5%
Graft courtesy of statehealthfacts.org
Diabetes Care, a Diabetes Association journal, reports that the number of Americans with diabetes will double in 25 years. The November issue says that the 23 million Americans with diabetes today will increase to 44 million by 2035. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the number of blacks with diabetes increased fourfold in two decades. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call this “chronic disease a deadly epidemic among African-Americans.”
Number of Diabetes Deaths per 100,000 Population by Race/Ethnicity, 2006
WI US
White 18.7 % 21.2 %
Black 46.5 % 45.2 %
Other 28.7 % 19.6 %
Graft courtesy of statehealthfacts.org
Why the higher death rates for blacks compared to whites, Asians, and Hispanics? Nutritionists blame the diabetic victim for being ignorant of evil food choices, according to Pollen (p. 71). Others blame blacks for not adopting the same hereditary metabolism as European whites. However, skeptics believe King’s theory, that “blacks are treated as second class citizens by the healthcare community,” said Dr. Vanessa Gamble, director of the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care. Still, do we want the same genetic trait that enables our bodies to assimilate highly refined sugar, corn syrup, glucose, artificial flavors, and other processed foods?
Research suggests that first and second generation Americans regress back to the herbal remedies and food diets of their culture when confronted by health obstacles. However, subsequent generations identified with the hierarchy of Americans who associated the smell of allyl methyl sulfide from garlic eating Italians or Eastern European’s allyl iso-thiocyanate smell from cabbage with lower class foreigners. The social stigma encouraged diet changes towards the western diet. Today, many Americans are returning to the ethnic foods that contributes to a retraction of diabetic symptoms.
Pollen writes about a group of diabetic Australian Aborigines reduced symptoms or eliminated diabetes when they returned to the lifestyle of their ancestors. Goldman explained that the “French Paradox” of French people eating more fat but having lower rates of heart disease then Americans, can be attributed to the combination of quality foods and how food is consumed. Pollen believes that the French dinner table is surrounded by a culture that values communal meals. “Food marketing encourages us to eat in front of the TV or in the car. Then we eat mindlessly and alone,” he said (p.192).
The food choices of African-American ancestors was also served in a group setting. The shaman of African became the Couco herb woman of southern U.S. and cured illnesses with herbs and vegetables. The diet did not give chronic diseases but did give family traditions. The slave diet of discarded meat byproducts and plants was healthier then today’s diet of enriched white flour and processed sugars. Research suggests that diabetes did not infiltrate African-American diets until the 20th century. The diet of underpaid and overworked blacks was partially limited to home vegetable gardens. The trend of today’s non-food diet may enslave cognitive thinking and physical agility that restricts economic and educational opportunities, according to the Food and Nutrition Service of the United States Department of Agriculture.
The vegetable diet of working class blacks consisted of pokeweed, collard greens, onions, and beets. These plants had the same nutrients, antioxidants, and cooking traits of food staples from the African continent. When the first African slaves landed on America’s east coast in 1619, their experience with wild foliage helped to identify squash, onions, and carrots. Africans also brought that same cuisine to the Southern United States where vegetables that were indigenous to Africa, were found in Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and the Carolinas. All of these plants were an excellent source of vitamin A, B6, and C, manganese, iron, calcium, folic acid, fiber and small amounts of omega 3 fatty acids. Vitamins those are essential for ensuring a quality mind and body.
While our slave ancestors could not harvest the cocoyam vegetable of West Africa and the transplanted Botswana Bushman could not follow a honey bird to an African beehive, the sweetness of the African sunset can still be found in the American sweet potato and watermelon.
Even today, the traditional Swahili dish of fried onions and sautéed tomatoes reproduced by slaves can also be adapted to today’s diet. It is true that we did not have the meat of the elephant and the hippopotamus to help sustain us under grinding physical labor. Nevertheless, the free-range meat of salmon, possums, squirrels, and rabbits replaced the protein of wild boar and rhinoceros of the jungle. And unlike the animals we consume from the market, these animals dined on the natural grains and grasses of the plains and forests without the help of today’s chemical hormone enhancers. “Is a steak from a feedlot steer that consumed a diet of corn, various industrial waste products, antibiotics, and hormones still natural?” Pollen asks (p. 143).
The inexpensive and free sources of onions, peppers, peas, rice, and legumes were natural resources of protein that also contained vitamins, minerals, and fiber according to The Book of World Vegetables. Vegetables, herbs, and spices replaced or enhanced meat at the dinner table. The inconsistent presence of meat on the dinner plate meant the slave relayed more on the cultural foods of our ancestors. The website Vegetarians in Paradise, believe that growing and consuming kale, broccoli, and brussels sprouts appealed to the cultural diet of enslaved blacks. According to Goldman, our ancestors used many of these same plants as herbal medication. “The chemical reaction in vegetables is responsible for everything good in your diet,” he said.
The same medical establishment that prescribes the prescription drugs is the same proscriber of fast food franchises as sources of nutrition, according to Pollen (p.142). Avandia, a diabetic medication, reports on its website that it’s diabetic medication may reduce blood flow and may cause weight gain. “The magnitude is stunning,” said Dr. Wayne Goodman of the American Medical Association. Thiazolidinediones in these drugs can cause fluid retention, which increases body weight. Besides legal drugs that influence weight gain, what is also of concern is what Pollen calls the cyanide pill of the Western diet.
Almost every native culture that adopts the salt and sugar of Western food diets has a large chance of becoming a diabetic, according to Pollen. No human is destined to staying healthy when consuming a daily diet of 40 percent sugar hidden as high-fructose corn syrup, or food additives of ethoxylated diglycerides or partially hydrogenated soy oil. Gary Taubes writes in Good Calories, Bad Calories that increased heart disease, obesity, cancer, and diabetes in the past half century can be blamed on refined carbohydrates. Pollen writes that Americans shifted their cultural and ethnic sensibilities about food to the marketing gurus of McDonald Hamburgers and Kellogg’s Fruit Loops. “We have to take back control of our food from food processors and scientists,” he said.
Bruce Ames, a UC Berkeley biochemist, believes that a diet replacing fruits and vegetables with high calorie foods keeps the body starving for nutrients that it can’t get from processed foods. The result is a body on a relentless pursuit to satisfy a never-ending hunger to find nutrition in processed foods. Ames believes a daily diet of fruits and vegetables protects against certain types of cancers (p.123). A Nov. 24th 2009 New York Times article cites that the bodies of overweight and obese people cannot properly defend against infections and some forms of cancer. The government’s nutritional pyramid recommends five servings of fruits and vegetables a day. A Center for Disease Control study shows that subjects who averaged eight or more servings of fruit and vegetables a day were 30% less likely to have a heart attack or stroke.
Irwin Goldman, Dean of UW-Madison School of Agriculture, said that vitamins, minerals and other vegetable nutrients play a key role in the body’s immune system by acting as antioxidants. “Thirty-percent of the vitamin A in the U.S. diet comes from carrots,” he said about beta-carotene. The World Health Organization reports that African-Americans should include vegetable nutrients like vitamin A in their diet. It will directly improve established, diet-related cardiovascular disease risk factors, such as blood pressure, hyperlipidemia, and diabetes, said the report. Processed foods contain 75 percent of the salt responsible for high blood pressure and blood clots in the African-American diet. Great sources of potassium that reduce high blood pressure from salt intake are spinach, cantaloupe, brussels sprouts, mushrooms, bananas, oranges, grapefruit, and potatoes. Most are found in the African continent as well as the Northern hemisphere.
Including vegetables in the diet of an urban dwelling African-American is difficult to say the least. Access to supermarkets with a variety of fresh vegetables is restricted by travel and affordability. James Baldwin writes in his autobiography about redefining the black struggle to include affordable and fresh vegetables. “Prices were ten cents higher in the neighborhood store then what you would pay at white supermarkets. And the vegetables in the neighborhood markets were brown around the edges and the fruits were overripe and bruised,” he wrote about urban grocery stores.
California’s African-American Five a Day research with low-income residents concluded that blacks buy more fruits and vegetables from farmers markets then they do from the neighborhood grocery stores. “Twenty-four percent of those who bought produce weekly from farmers’ markets were also more likely to meet the daily recommendation of fruits and vegetables,” concluded the 2005 report. “These farmers grow in healthier soils, for healthier plants and animals. This in turn means healthier people,” said Pollen (pg. 169).
In conclusion, the African tribes of American ancestry like the Ugali should still include rice as a major part of their diet; Ugali rice-farmer slaves showed slave-owners how to grow and harvest rice in the Carolinas. Baton de Manioc descendants would get fiber in their diet by baking the gluten free bread of their ancestors. Fiber slows down the absorption of food in the gut resulting in better blood sugar control for diabetics. Allium loving ancestors of the Maziwa tribe no longer find onions an expensive delicacy in America. The taste for methyl propyl disulphide will help break up blood platelets leading to high blood pressure, according to Goldman. The natural foods of our ethnic and cultural history will help prevent illness.
Choose wisely! Choose vegetables! Choose Life! Choose vegetables.
###
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Garden of Diversity
12/24/09 4:47 AM
thomasjasengardner
GARDEN OF DIVERSITY
While unearthing garden beets this fall, I looked upon nature’s indifference to color, shape, and size. The tall yellow corn, the orange carrots, the beige cantaloupe, and the Marion cane-berries are an appetizing rainbow in the black sandy soil. The marvel of nutritional harmony that vegetables provide is a uniqueness of genetic genomes. The intricacies of nature only equal the complications of the human gene.
The beet was encased in a deep serious red skin. Its fibrous core selflessly produces calcium, vitamin C, and anti-oxidants for human consumption. The building block of man’s existence is a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables. This garden of life has been the magic used by shamans, necromancers, brujerias, or sorcerers. Our great-grandmothers still use these natural recipes for fighting colds, healing muscles, and stopping headaches.
An epiphany overwhelmed me as I thought how a plant’s ordained source of medicine and nutrition could help overcome social apprehensions and pious rejections. If we shared the food of our ancestors; our mutual rejections and material loathing would be reduced to universal curiosity and unmitigated adventures. Our conspiracy theories of hate and mistrust would be dismissed by the conscious senses of tantalizing taste and fragrant smells.
If we view the foundation of food as a source of man’s superior advantage, then we should also take advantage of our cognitive ability to garden. The presence of cabbage, squash, and onion is in the diets of many cultures. Food remains unabashed by unabridged culinary presentations. All life benefits from the universal need of comfort from food. Exchanging the ethnic diets of our individual heritage does not compromise our social beliefs for public compassion and self-respect. Various people with the same values, dreams, and ideals present the same food in different ways.
Nature’s cornucopia is a delirious delicacy to every person in every country; regardless of color, creed, or religion. It is natures mission to compromise in order to prosper. While maintaining their individuality, plants cross-pollinated their complex knowledge to resist herbivores, insects, and blight. The potato grown around the world led to different subspecies. Each tuber identified as a potato by the host culture. In addition, the onion’s reputation for being in the diet of every culture is not happenstance.
Each part of the world has a love of red, green, or yellow or purple tomatoes. Beneath the different skins lies the same locum. This could not happen unless horticulture cooperated to nurture and cultivate nature to its best function. Can we humans collaborate to nurture and cultivate what lays beneath our skin, culture, or religion?
Like varieties of cultivated carrots, ethnic cultures too, must cognitively unite. To resist the diseases of environmental injustice, institutional racism, and economic depravity requires the same cooperation seen in functional plants. Plants used in ethnic menus, can function as ambassadors of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
As different cultures on campus, we must unite like different plants of the forest; and expound upon our capability to help each other grow towards these aforementioned sacred rights. Our indifferent gardening patterns in climatic weather, or mid-western sandy loam is no difference at all. Vegetables too, shape their environment to their communal needs. As students, faculty, and staff, we can do no less. We must join defenses to fight the ironies of hate and deceit that stifle our right to grow. Like gardeners, we should weed out active predation, exploitation, and oppression that stymie our communal reconciliation.
To be a plant is to rejoice in the photosynthesis of life. Yes, humans may consume root vegetables to get the same Vitamin D. However, the human body, like the vegetable plant, requires the smoothing delicacy from sunrays of hope and cool nights of inspiration. I believe this project comprises the elements necessary to prune societies garden from vestige weeds of past centuries. The self-preservation of plants was not a mistake. Neither should our own efforts be to fulfill our functional potential.
Malicious and benevolent.
I’m a last century boy.
thomasjasengardner
GARDEN OF DIVERSITY
While unearthing garden beets this fall, I looked upon nature’s indifference to color, shape, and size. The tall yellow corn, the orange carrots, the beige cantaloupe, and the Marion cane-berries are an appetizing rainbow in the black sandy soil. The marvel of nutritional harmony that vegetables provide is a uniqueness of genetic genomes. The intricacies of nature only equal the complications of the human gene.
The beet was encased in a deep serious red skin. Its fibrous core selflessly produces calcium, vitamin C, and anti-oxidants for human consumption. The building block of man’s existence is a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables. This garden of life has been the magic used by shamans, necromancers, brujerias, or sorcerers. Our great-grandmothers still use these natural recipes for fighting colds, healing muscles, and stopping headaches.
An epiphany overwhelmed me as I thought how a plant’s ordained source of medicine and nutrition could help overcome social apprehensions and pious rejections. If we shared the food of our ancestors; our mutual rejections and material loathing would be reduced to universal curiosity and unmitigated adventures. Our conspiracy theories of hate and mistrust would be dismissed by the conscious senses of tantalizing taste and fragrant smells.
If we view the foundation of food as a source of man’s superior advantage, then we should also take advantage of our cognitive ability to garden. The presence of cabbage, squash, and onion is in the diets of many cultures. Food remains unabashed by unabridged culinary presentations. All life benefits from the universal need of comfort from food. Exchanging the ethnic diets of our individual heritage does not compromise our social beliefs for public compassion and self-respect. Various people with the same values, dreams, and ideals present the same food in different ways.
Nature’s cornucopia is a delirious delicacy to every person in every country; regardless of color, creed, or religion. It is natures mission to compromise in order to prosper. While maintaining their individuality, plants cross-pollinated their complex knowledge to resist herbivores, insects, and blight. The potato grown around the world led to different subspecies. Each tuber identified as a potato by the host culture. In addition, the onion’s reputation for being in the diet of every culture is not happenstance.
Each part of the world has a love of red, green, or yellow or purple tomatoes. Beneath the different skins lies the same locum. This could not happen unless horticulture cooperated to nurture and cultivate nature to its best function. Can we humans collaborate to nurture and cultivate what lays beneath our skin, culture, or religion?
Like varieties of cultivated carrots, ethnic cultures too, must cognitively unite. To resist the diseases of environmental injustice, institutional racism, and economic depravity requires the same cooperation seen in functional plants. Plants used in ethnic menus, can function as ambassadors of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
As different cultures on campus, we must unite like different plants of the forest; and expound upon our capability to help each other grow towards these aforementioned sacred rights. Our indifferent gardening patterns in climatic weather, or mid-western sandy loam is no difference at all. Vegetables too, shape their environment to their communal needs. As students, faculty, and staff, we can do no less. We must join defenses to fight the ironies of hate and deceit that stifle our right to grow. Like gardeners, we should weed out active predation, exploitation, and oppression that stymie our communal reconciliation.
To be a plant is to rejoice in the photosynthesis of life. Yes, humans may consume root vegetables to get the same Vitamin D. However, the human body, like the vegetable plant, requires the smoothing delicacy from sunrays of hope and cool nights of inspiration. I believe this project comprises the elements necessary to prune societies garden from vestige weeds of past centuries. The self-preservation of plants was not a mistake. Neither should our own efforts be to fulfill our functional potential.
Malicious and benevolent.
I’m a last century boy.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
laissez-faire capitalism
Mademoiselle Joan Walsh of Salon;
"I'm not a member of any organized party. I am a Democrat."
Will Rodgers said that.
The values of a laissez-faire capitalism supported by a puppet legislative government is reflective in your conversation about the history of the overworked and underpaid American. While your audience swells up with the suggestion of being elitist intelligentsia, not many comments got the true grit of your intended discussion. As a black patriot, your nutshell psychoanalysis of consumerism and the social science of profiteers that reduce Americans to chess pieces made my heart melt with cognitive affection. Such accurate interpretation of how the values and morals of United States of America's rich and famous just replaced European aristocrats who offer Angel food cake to the poor and downtrodden as they party with lobbyists.
Unfortunately, both Democrat and Republican politicians have joined the ranks of arrogant snobs who use the science of mass marketing to fulfill our needs for instant gratification with empty code words of schizophrenic propaganda enforced by class separation with the police as gatekeepers.
Thank you for being you.
I shall be pleased to discover more about you in your conversations Joan Walsh.
"I'm not a member of any organized party. I am a Democrat."
Will Rodgers said that.
The values of a laissez-faire capitalism supported by a puppet legislative government is reflective in your conversation about the history of the overworked and underpaid American. While your audience swells up with the suggestion of being elitist intelligentsia, not many comments got the true grit of your intended discussion. As a black patriot, your nutshell psychoanalysis of consumerism and the social science of profiteers that reduce Americans to chess pieces made my heart melt with cognitive affection. Such accurate interpretation of how the values and morals of United States of America's rich and famous just replaced European aristocrats who offer Angel food cake to the poor and downtrodden as they party with lobbyists.
Unfortunately, both Democrat and Republican politicians have joined the ranks of arrogant snobs who use the science of mass marketing to fulfill our needs for instant gratification with empty code words of schizophrenic propaganda enforced by class separation with the police as gatekeepers.
Thank you for being you.
I shall be pleased to discover more about you in your conversations Joan Walsh.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Morning Meeting of MSNBC
Dylan of MSNBC
Hey You! As a black man, I have come to like you a lot. Each morning you instill in me the belief that someone admired Cronkite for more then his popularity. My wife is skeptical. She still believes I'm still in love with Huffington. Just because I made her die her hair red, and talk in a foreign accent, and wear matronly clothes does not mean I'm in love with Huffington. She says just because I like you does not mean she is going to shave and cut her hair.
Take care.
By the way, the black comic side kick with no surname has my vote.
Hey You! As a black man, I have come to like you a lot. Each morning you instill in me the belief that someone admired Cronkite for more then his popularity. My wife is skeptical. She still believes I'm still in love with Huffington. Just because I made her die her hair red, and talk in a foreign accent, and wear matronly clothes does not mean I'm in love with Huffington. She says just because I like you does not mean she is going to shave and cut her hair.
Take care.
By the way, the black comic side kick with no surname has my vote.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
black cop co-workers
This is just to say, that in 1968, in Memphis, Tenn., I was beaten up by 7 cops while trying to peacefully see Dr. King. One was a black man who beat me the most viciously. As a 14 yr. old boy, that image still haunts me. I must say, that he was trying to impress his white peers that he too could hurt blacks without remorse. He wanted to say, work as a black cop is hard to find and i know u only let me in reluctantly, but i will prove that i too hate blacks. As he beat me, I looked into his eyes and asked him, If his mother knew what he did for a living. Did your mother raise you to hate your black brothers. did your mother raise you to hurt black children.
But each swing got harder with each question. I guess If i was to be killed at the hands of cops, i knew it was only the black cop who would have nightmares forever and ever
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Racial Profiling
Once again, the media just does not get it. They claim that Gates being arrested in his own home was a honest mistake by local police. What the media did not do is research the history of Cambridge cops to find racial profiling has become quite common for the small town sheriff.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Racist Reporters
thomasjasengardner
News junkies resent the death of Michael J. Jackson. It intrudes upon their masochistic desire to enjoy the various scenes of bloody traumas facing the world. Believe me, the death of Socrates, and the death of Lincoln, and the death of Roosevelt created as much media hyperbole about as MJ does today.
In past centuries, the lives of artists like Shakespeare and Picasso and the suicide of an one-eared artist, created controversy, conversation, and contriteness from tabloid writers. MJ’s mass media coverage is no different from the media frenzy given to deceased icons from long ago. Maybe the conservative media is jealous of how the death of President Reagan or Elvis Presley did not warrant the same media hype. They need not worry; media obsession with the black MJ is still second to the white Princess Di’s mass media funeral obsession.
Like the CEO’s of Detroit auto manufacturers, the media pundits just don’t get all the attention directed at MJ. The topics of war, poverty, and environment have always been requiems for MJ. His history is not limited to a controversial trial that found him innocent of all charges. Alternatively, the physiological demons that influenced his physical appearance is another episode in the life of another American icon.
The life of an American soldier and the effects of war upon the innocent civilian is of utmost concern to Jackson. This is proven by his visit to Walter Reed Hospital where he praised injured Iraqi soldiers. His concern about the rain forest and increasing deserts was exhibited in his songs and monetary contributions to just causes. The plight of people living in dismal hopelessness all around the world; was clearly examined within MJ’s songs and music videos.
There is ignorance about Michael Jackson in contemporary America that bears no relationship to the impact that this human being had upon the world. Watching MSNBC's liberal newscasters simply categorize Jackson as a weird demented icon was heart wrenching. They destroyed my image of a passionate and empathetic news station and cruelly reminded me of FOX's discriminatory coverage of OJ Simpson. There is a hereditary trend for whites to automatically view black males as guilty no matter how innocent.
But these hypocritical commentators stop short of lambasting Princess Di for her extramarital affairs featured on tabloid headlines. On the other hand, no one castrated the rockabilly King on his deathbed for his public use of amphetamines and barbiturates. MJ’s erratic behavior was publicized like a cattle prod up his fans collective asses; because no matter how famous he was,...no matter how many presidents invited him into the white house,...no matter how many NGO’s survived with his donations,...and no matter how many of his musical peers recognized his genius,...and no matter that 30.1 million people felt empathy about his death; naysayers did not easily acknowledge his professional awards or his contributions to society, because he is a black male. Every successful black male will acknowledge the tribulations and traumas associated with breaking the glass ceiling of a white male world.
But the press only saw his follies. Various orators could hardly accomplish their long and laborious speechifying meant to dispel the highest praises of international leaders and the noblest honor of men upon the golden soul of MJ.
White House enslaved construction workers
The White House is preparing to honor the black slaves of men who built this international symbol of democracy. A memorial of sandstone blocks will stand as a dedication to the men who were whipped and beaten into building a caricature of Greek democracy.
In the anti-bellum era of our country's history, black men did most of the skilled and unskilled labor in America. Skilled black men like Frederick Douglas, brought their freedom with extra money earned from their trade. When white men realized the income potential earned as a carpenter, bricklayer, painter, or stagehand; they blacklisted blacks from these jobs by organizing themselves into segregated labor unions. Through intimidation and manipulation, employers could no longer hire the best-qualified tradesmen, but were restricted to using white union tradesmen for construction and manufacturing jobs. Even today, these guilds are secret societies with restrictive membership.
The stone grave marker for black tradesmen who built the Capital building, should also mark the end of skilled black labor. Unions restrict the same black labor from working on the Urban Leagues new building. It is ironic that an organization dedicated to training and employing black men for jobs was unable to secure employment for black men to help build their own building. My deep throat source tells me that concrete plans for the building have been in discussion for three years, and efforts to secure skilled employment for its underemployed and underpaid constituents were continually ignored.
An urban league representative offered the old racist adage that now was not the time to distract contractors with pleas for job equality at tax supported job sites. Martin Luther King said about equality, if the past was not the right time, and now is not the right time, when is the time to ask for the rights and privileges that every American rightfully deserves since the dawn of this country. With the construction new building, the Urban League passed up an opportunity to guarantee training for the trades. Maybe the contractor that is an advent donation to the urban league got the job to build the building if his donations made up for not hiring black men on the job. This nefarious act of betrayal is not unheard of in the world of deceitful lobbyist and conniving politicians. This is not the first time middle class representatives of the black community have forsaken the needs of the black working class.
The 100 middle class Black Men of Madison, black ministers, and black politicians are notorious for undermining the social desires and economic needs of poor working blacks. After 100 years of NAACP and 50 years of Urban League interaction for civil rights, only token examples of success have materialized. Examples of ineptitude include...
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Racism is alive and well
Mother Jones reports that a white owned swimming pool has closed its doors to blacks. Is this evidence of things to come or did Jim Crow ever leave?
Monday, July 6, 2009
Young Republicans
Its always open season on blacks. Some of you educated white liberals might admit that 82 percent (2004 stats) of you will enjoy racist comments made by your peers. In private conversation, you will not stop the degradation of another human being if that person is black.
Look around your work sites. Where are your black co-workers? seventy percent of middle and middle upper class blacks work in government. Government is the only employer dedicated to closing the ever widening employment gap between black and white. Private sector has your permission to exclude blacks because you feel uncomfortable with more then two blacks in the same room.
President Obama said the most segregated place in American is church on Sunday morning. He's wrong, with only 6 percent of black news reporters sitting in the newsroom. I say that the most segregated place is the newsroom on Monday morning, writing negative copy about blacks to reinforce stereotypes formulated by the press.
Another issue is how some of you are so childish to believe its socially acceptable to call blacks names. Well, let me say, at my age, I have never heard any black refer to whites as polacks, spics, potato heads, Marshmallow, Ofay Trailer Trash, etc.etc.
And then again, I remember as a black Vietnam Veteran, that the Vietnamese could claim american citizenship as long as they could say the 'n' word. Other foreigners have also learned that this lesson is the true path to citizenship. But you don't hear blacks saying pakis or towelheads in public or private.
So, whats your excuse?
Look around your work sites. Where are your black co-workers? seventy percent of middle and middle upper class blacks work in government. Government is the only employer dedicated to closing the ever widening employment gap between black and white. Private sector has your permission to exclude blacks because you feel uncomfortable with more then two blacks in the same room.
President Obama said the most segregated place in American is church on Sunday morning. He's wrong, with only 6 percent of black news reporters sitting in the newsroom. I say that the most segregated place is the newsroom on Monday morning, writing negative copy about blacks to reinforce stereotypes formulated by the press.
Another issue is how some of you are so childish to believe its socially acceptable to call blacks names. Well, let me say, at my age, I have never heard any black refer to whites as polacks, spics, potato heads, Marshmallow, Ofay Trailer Trash, etc.etc.
And then again, I remember as a black Vietnam Veteran, that the Vietnamese could claim american citizenship as long as they could say the 'n' word. Other foreigners have also learned that this lesson is the true path to citizenship. But you don't hear blacks saying pakis or towelheads in public or private.
So, whats your excuse?
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Racism is alive and well in OZ
To the Madison City Council:
White supremacy is alive and well in Madison, Wisconsin, but you just don’t get it. White officials want to deny civil rights to black men by taking away the one thing that enforces action. The power to convict racist assholes!
Remember when those rich guys from the auto plants flew to Washington in private jets with their hands out for public money. It was too late but they promised to come to the next meeting in gas upped Pintos and collapsible Corvairs. But the public kept saying they just don’t get it. Then there were rumors of luxurious private parties and lavish Vegas gambling jaunts. Once again, the public said, they just don’t get it.
Well, it looks like you sitting there in your, made in Vietnam simulated leather chairs, and just don’t get it. When you drive around town, who do you see working. When you drive past a street? Did you notice not one black man is on that crew? When you walk though road construction sites paid for with tax incremental financing of federal dollars, who do you see working? You do not see a black man working. When you see a building construction paid for by federal tax dollars; i.e. campus buildings, bridges,
and airports. Who do you not see working? White women and black men. When you see a private company using tax dollars to buy land and build buildings, you don’t see a black man working on the project or in the building working after its completed.
When you deny DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS the power to enforce the hiring of black men, you just don’t get it do you? Seventy percent of the black middle class works for the government. Yet, you just don’t see the nepotism that takes place in private business. Sure, the opera house, Vogel Construction, Oscar Meyer, and Forward Electric have a right to hire qualified personnel, but when qualified black men are continually turned away from unadvertised job openings; you just don’t see the pattern of discrimination; you don’t hear the cries for empathy, you don’t speak out against apathy. You just don’t get it.
You just don’t get how a small business owner or a company that receives public funds could reject a qualified black man. You just don’t get it, do you. You just don’t get how a company could do business with the city for 20 years and never find a qualified black man to hire. You, like me, should walk though the hollowed halls of city, county and state government offices with the published list of empty seats reserved for blacks that human resources can never find. This list of missing black employees has grown longer, not shorter over the last 20 years.
You don’t get how the city has been lying to blacks about seriously understanding how a black man could apply for a open position and not get hired. Because if you did you would see how the streets of our city are being built by the brothers, classmates, drinking buddies, hunting friends, uncles, sisters, and cousins of company owners who would willingly pay a small fine and still not ever hire black men to work on a federally funded project.
I’m sure some of you heard about the women who claimed two burly black men kidnapped her and stole her child. As intelligent representatives of the city, you may ask yourself how could anyone come up with such a cock and bull story. But the fact of the matter is, this is not the first time that a city’s police department has been mislead to believe that black men were the perpetrators of a car jacking or other violent crime. But this is the first time the police did not do a massive roundup of black men as the usual suspects. Police fought against this built-in bias against black men and correctly assumed that over 70 percent of crimes where a black man was a perpetrator was a race conscious lie. This woman assumed no one would question her despicable beliefs. What do you do or say when your friend, relative, neighbor, co-worker spouts sardonic hatred? Empirical research shows that most whites are congenial about racism and its effects upon society.
A company recently decided to search for police records of black applicants. To the surprise of the human relations department, none of the black applicants had police records. Previously, the director had assumed that all blacks have criminal records so why even accept applications from black applicants. You too, have denied the truth of institutional racism that denies a black man a right to work in order to support his family, his community, and his city. You see the truth, but you can’t handle it; do you dismiss guilt because black social realism is trivia trash?
By denying the civil rights office power to enforce the law, you just don’t get it. You are complacent about the pre-conceived notions of black men that each of you have consciously or unconsciously inherited from family, friends, and co-workers. These biased insinuations handed down from generation to generation are endemic of people who deny the Jewish Holocaust and deny 400 years of socially engineered slavery.
It is disingenuous to think 400 years of institutionalized scientifically applied slavery, Jim Crow laws, housing discrimination, job discrimination, health care discrimination, and education inequity is going to be fixed in 60 years by businesses and generations of racists rolling over and volunteering to be good Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics, Seventh-Day Adventist, Lutherans, Baptists, Hindu, Pentecostalism, Mormons, Scientologist, and Episcopalians. The fact that over 51 percent of local businesses are small businesses does not preclude the fact that some are working on city projects funded by federal funds. Funds that by law should help employ the generations of unemployed black men in Madison. The predetermined criminal record of a black man is because 3 out of 4 black men have had encounters with police. Police stopping men who are driving while black is a national phenomenon that people just don’t get. Racism is a disease and the cure is the law. Trickle down policies predicting that employers will follow their conscious works if the employer has a conscious.
You cannot be blind, deaf, and silent, about the factual systematic incarceration of black men by police, judges, probation officers, parole boards, jail guards, and juries purposely and publicly display their disdain for black men. As an elected politician, how can you not want to be involved in these situations? This tool of right wing recruitment is cannon fodder for extremism mayhem. This includes denying DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS the right to enforce rules that protect all Americans from their ignorant anti-Semitic racist prophesies. But you just don’t get it.
To deny DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS power is the height of irresponsibility to the Madison citizenry. As politicians, you must know that the current social and economic traumas will unleash the venom of violent extremists. Your pretzel logic to deny this power is unconstitutional. The past few decades has only seen a token increase in the hiring of blacks in government and in private business. Research about a local manufacturing plant tells me how management attends seminars about how to legally not hire blacks without being sued for racial discrimination. Your ultimate obligation is to insure that city, county, state, federal governments, and private businesses do not hide behind a sea of judicial hyperbole that prolongs the anxiety of the black man waiting in the wings to be hired. Is it true what I read about how proprietors who are found guilty of housing or job discrimination can secretly pay a fine and continue to discriminate? My deep throat (review of city council minutes) tells me city officials are in cahoots with private businesses and human resource staffs who intentionally violent national, state, and local laws that prohibit all forms of racial discrimination and nepotistic hiring guidelines. Do black men have to bleed profusely or have their sliced fingers publicly displayed before you see the psychological and social scars carried out by your inaction? But as your public hiring records show and newspapers have revealed; nepotism plays a role in who is hired. Since no blacks are hired, though the back door we can assume that friends and relatives who look like the people in power are quickly hired into these hate circles that share the same racist views. But just like the rich and powerful, you just don’t get it.
You have not adequately monitored the negative rhetoric that keeps blacks from these jobs. White sympathizers to black employees say that this same stereotyped rhetoric gets blacks intentionally fired when white saboteurs act on their hatred. In addition, when employers are forced to obey the affirmative action laws that are their civic responsibility to carry out, they prolong not hiring with guidelines from unions and manufacturing lobbyists. How do you reconcile the blatant truth of spitefulness and hatefulness that keeps blacks from feeding their families, from paying taxes, from being a citizen in a democracy in a country they have helped to build?
By not giving DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS absolute power, you are undermining the death of Dr. Martin Luther King and the sacrifice of Rosa Parks. Society allowed the lynching of Emmett Till and the gassing of Anne Frank. Do you represent blacks in society or do you represent businesses that find you a racist compatriot? Are you helping to tie the noose and turning on the gas or just another anonymous liberal hypocrite of freedom and liberty, who watch as the smoke plumes from the gas chambers disappear from your sight and mind.
It is disconcerting to know a white politician got the black vote because he likes gospel music, Tiger Woods, and chit’lins. The silent protests of institutional racism in Dane County by 100 black men of Madison is synonymous with anti-bellum minstrel music. Black ministers and black professionals have a history of being anonymous to current events that affect their relationship with the established power structure. Even a fleeting association with blacks reveals that white resentment is a racist derangement; a dismal attitude attached to mainstream society. There are 10,000 hate groups on line. Nine hundred and twenty-six white supremacy websites get nearly 10,000 hits a day to celebrate the silent genocide of the black male and Negro/Jew. Isolated incidents of racism are uniformly destructive but you just don’t get it. White supremacy is alive and well in government or why else would it take 60 years and more to resolve what is overt racism and what is courteous impertinence. Both are motivated by the politics of fear and loathing. But you still don’t get it.
This is a struggle between good and evil. You can no longer increase the police budget without seeing the repercussions of decreasing the funding of youth activities that show society does care about them. You must see the liaison between increasing jail space and the increasing education gap. Don’t you think black mothers also want their new born sons to have the skills necessary to work on a road crew, to sit in that office cubicle, to finance a loan? Nativity is no longer an excuse when you see no black men at your dinner table, as your co-worker or in your church pews. Some suggest that blacks and Jews should just get over it, but they just don’t get it. Racism is a mandate that is consciously or unconsciously supported by your inattention to the truth that people deny the Holocaust happened; people also deny that lynching, raping, castrating, and dismembering black men was an instant holiday for white people. (Recently a judge dropped charges against two white men for dragging a black man behind a truck until he was dismembered because the evidence was pulverized.) People deny that prison factory towns are dependent upon the courts to keep the townspeople employed; the probation officer regurgitating inmates also keeps his job and local police are counterfeiting evidence with propaganda that hides the lowering crime rate. When will the police department have to hold a rummage sale for money to buy M-16 semi-automatic rifles and students get issued new books from tax money instead of 10 year old recycled pamphlets?
What are your principles? What is your strategy to right 400 years of scientifically applied racism that kept black men from owning rural farmland, owning their own business, or working like any other man alongside any other man? Well, let me say that I’m disappointed in the intelligence of the council and I’m not going to stand by and watch ignorant selflessness keep black men unemployed. You can join me in the fight against this ingrained evil or you can take the consequences of a retaliatory federal government.
The transparency of the Obama administration dictates efficiency. Federal funded projects in the city of Madison can come under the scrutiny of everyday citizens. To emphasize the continued racist hiring policies of private and public contractors, I have enlisted volunteers to apply for jobs with organizations receiving federal funding. As you know, the publication of projects using federal funds allows me to research past and current federally funded projects that historically physically/mentally abuse, while under utilizing, under employing, and under paying black employees.
Researchers have been assigned to video record working areas for visually accompaniment of DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS/EEO records. Public resources that reveal the number of years and failed attempts at hiring and retaining black men are also available at public and private institutions. I am in direct correspondence with Sharon D. Eller, Director of Civil Rights for the Department of the Interior and Mary N. Whigham Jones, Deputy Director, Departmental Office of Civil Rights within the Department of Transportation, who will be constantly updated about hiring and firing policies of public and private entities who use American Recovery and Reinvestment of 2009 funds.
I have social contacts with representatives from the following agencies who report one common consistency; the unemployed black male:
* Schools and homeless school liaisons;
* Workforce centers;
* Employment counselors (welfare to work programs);
* Property managers, landlord groups, and tenants’ associations;
* Housing courts and legal aid agencies;
* County veterans’ services offices and other veterans’ services offices;
* Multifamily housing associations;
* Discharge planning departments at jails, prisons, and mental health, chemical dependency, and other institutions;
* Probation offices;
* Domestic violence service providers;
* Food shelves and soup kitchens;
* The faith community;
* Housing authorities;
* Family support centers;
* Police;
* Child welfare agencies;
* Head Start and Early Head Start; and
* Consumer Advocate Groups.
The unemployment rate in the black community is twice as high as the general citizenry because of temporary employment, and those who are so disillusioned by the continuum of subtle racism, they no longer look for work. Linking black people with jobs funded by the economic stimulus package will address their other needs and defy the hopelessness, depression, and gloominess that helplessly accompany sustained poverty.
This is a patriotic mission that begins when I applied for three jobs offered by DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS. I contacted the contractors with a formal application, a resume, and a cover letter. With no forth coming reply I telephoned and left messages. When it was clearly obvious that procrastination of their reply was meant to discourage me, I contacted the DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS office and was told while private contractors doing city work were supposed to hire black employees, they could not enforce the rules and contractors simply ignored the rules because they knew a penalty if any would be slight and hidden from public scrutiny.
While working as a union apprentice, I stated to the Work Force and Development representative that while I did not being used as the mule, I certainly wanted to apply my skills to the job; she replied that because I was a black male I was ‘lucky to be working at all, and be thankful for the bull work I get.’ When applying to the State Division of Rehabilitation for re-training or additional training, I submitted strategic long term technical plans to secure additional training and employment in my field. All ideas were met by white South African raised state employees who were publicly skeptical of my intellectual ability as a skilled black man.
If you think I am frustrated, you are the pompous liberal jerk everyone says you are. I am disillusioned that the prophecies of our Jeffersonian democracy have almost soured by 36 years of bitter Brownshirt behavior towards blacks that was sanctioned by Democrats and well meaning Republicans. Because of the new king of the hill, I do believe that messages of inclusiveness will be welcome by this cabinet. But unless someone takes responsibility to insure that tests are multi-intelligent; that police do not stereotype perpetrators, and that city governments spend federal money according to the Constitution and the by-laws of the tax-stimulus package, I guess it will be moi’ looking over your shoulder for continued proof of your infidelity to humanity. Because three years ago I wrote and commented on the discrepancy in hiring policies by city contractors, but you failed to see the decades long pattern. You just don’t get it.
If you wish to receive copies of testimonials sent to dept of interior and dept of transportation, please contact a local social service agency listed above. Because reporting discrimination reports are binded by time constraints, technical jargon, and job loss retaliation that dissuades victims from filing discrimination reports, I cannot promise victims will allow the release of their names to local officials. Nevertheless, you will not torpedo Affirmative Action/Equal Employment Opportunity programs on my watch. Obama has received hundreds of death threats, black Americans have experienced thousands upon thousands of hate crime; are these individual acts a coincidence or unorganized conspiracy? It is no wonder that the few blacks who are gainfully employed put blinders on to protect themselves from white retaliation. (I refer you to the Home Security Report on Domestic Surveillance) Pro-business does not mean anti-black, otherwise you would of insisted that business tax write-offs include obeying federal hiring policies when using federal funds. As your voting records show, pro-business at the expense of the underemployed and overworked is a trend.
Some of us water our horse at the same trough, but you have made the waters murky with your proposal that naively believes in morals and virtues. If you look closely upon the waves of change, you will see the image of Emmett Till looking up at you with a truth all black men still experience in the 21st Century. If you read Anne Frank, you know the pain from extremists is real in business and government.
Thank you for your time.
thomasjasengardner
thomasjasen@gmail.com
White supremacy is alive and well in Madison, Wisconsin, but you just don’t get it. White officials want to deny civil rights to black men by taking away the one thing that enforces action. The power to convict racist assholes!
Remember when those rich guys from the auto plants flew to Washington in private jets with their hands out for public money. It was too late but they promised to come to the next meeting in gas upped Pintos and collapsible Corvairs. But the public kept saying they just don’t get it. Then there were rumors of luxurious private parties and lavish Vegas gambling jaunts. Once again, the public said, they just don’t get it.
Well, it looks like you sitting there in your, made in Vietnam simulated leather chairs, and just don’t get it. When you drive around town, who do you see working. When you drive past a street? Did you notice not one black man is on that crew? When you walk though road construction sites paid for with tax incremental financing of federal dollars, who do you see working? You do not see a black man working. When you see a building construction paid for by federal tax dollars; i.e. campus buildings, bridges,
and airports. Who do you not see working? White women and black men. When you see a private company using tax dollars to buy land and build buildings, you don’t see a black man working on the project or in the building working after its completed.When you deny DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS the power to enforce the hiring of black men, you just don’t get it do you? Seventy percent of the black middle class works for the government. Yet, you just don’t see the nepotism that takes place in private business. Sure, the opera house, Vogel Construction, Oscar Meyer, and Forward Electric have a right to hire qualified personnel, but when qualified black men are continually turned away from unadvertised job openings; you just don’t see the pattern of discrimination; you don’t hear the cries for empathy, you don’t speak out against apathy. You just don’t get it.
You just don’t get how a small business owner or a company that receives public funds could reject a qualified black man. You just don’t get it, do you. You just don’t get how a company could do business with the city for 20 years and never find a qualified black man to hire. You, like me, should walk though the hollowed halls of city, county and state government offices with the published list of empty seats reserved for blacks that human resources can never find. This list of missing black employees has grown longer, not shorter over the last 20 years.
You don’t get how the city has been lying to blacks about seriously understanding how a black man could apply for a open position and not get hired. Because if you did you would see how the streets of our city are being built by the brothers, classmates, drinking buddies, hunting friends, uncles, sisters, and cousins of company owners who would willingly pay a small fine and still not ever hire black men to work on a federally funded project.
I’m sure some of you heard about the women who claimed two burly black men kidnapped her and stole her child. As intelligent representatives of the city, you may ask yourself how could anyone come up with such a cock and bull story. But the fact of the matter is, this is not the first time that a city’s police department has been mislead to believe that black men were the perpetrators of a car jacking or other violent crime. But this is the first time the police did not do a massive roundup of black men as the usual suspects. Police fought against this built-in bias against black men and correctly assumed that over 70 percent of crimes where a black man was a perpetrator was a race conscious lie. This woman assumed no one would question her despicable beliefs. What do you do or say when your friend, relative, neighbor, co-worker spouts sardonic hatred? Empirical research shows that most whites are congenial about racism and its effects upon society.
A company recently decided to search for police records of black applicants. To the surprise of the human relations department, none of the black applicants had police records. Previously, the director had assumed that all blacks have criminal records so why even accept applications from black applicants. You too, have denied the truth of institutional racism that denies a black man a right to work in order to support his family, his community, and his city. You see the truth, but you can’t handle it; do you dismiss guilt because black social realism is trivia trash?
By denying the civil rights office power to enforce the law, you just don’t get it. You are complacent about the pre-conceived notions of black men that each of you have consciously or unconsciously inherited from family, friends, and co-workers. These biased insinuations handed down from generation to generation are endemic of people who deny the Jewish Holocaust and deny 400 years of socially engineered slavery.
It is disingenuous to think 400 years of institutionalized scientifically applied slavery, Jim Crow laws, housing discrimination, job discrimination, health care discrimination, and education inequity is going to be fixed in 60 years by businesses and generations of racists rolling over and volunteering to be good Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics, Seventh-Day Adventist, Lutherans, Baptists, Hindu, Pentecostalism, Mormons, Scientologist, and Episcopalians. The fact that over 51 percent of local businesses are small businesses does not preclude the fact that some are working on city projects funded by federal funds. Funds that by law should help employ the generations of unemployed black men in Madison. The predetermined criminal record of a black man is because 3 out of 4 black men have had encounters with police. Police stopping men who are driving while black is a national phenomenon that people just don’t get. Racism is a disease and the cure is the law. Trickle down policies predicting that employers will follow their conscious works if the employer has a conscious.
You cannot be blind, deaf, and silent, about the factual systematic incarceration of black men by police, judges, probation officers, parole boards, jail guards, and juries purposely and publicly display their disdain for black men. As an elected politician, how can you not want to be involved in these situations? This tool of right wing recruitment is cannon fodder for extremism mayhem. This includes denying DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS the right to enforce rules that protect all Americans from their ignorant anti-Semitic racist prophesies. But you just don’t get it.
To deny DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS power is the height of irresponsibility to the Madison citizenry. As politicians, you must know that the current social and economic traumas will unleash the venom of violent extremists. Your pretzel logic to deny this power is unconstitutional. The past few decades has only seen a token increase in the hiring of blacks in government and in private business. Research about a local manufacturing plant tells me how management attends seminars about how to legally not hire blacks without being sued for racial discrimination. Your ultimate obligation is to insure that city, county, state, federal governments, and private businesses do not hide behind a sea of judicial hyperbole that prolongs the anxiety of the black man waiting in the wings to be hired. Is it true what I read about how proprietors who are found guilty of housing or job discrimination can secretly pay a fine and continue to discriminate? My deep throat (review of city council minutes) tells me city officials are in cahoots with private businesses and human resource staffs who intentionally violent national, state, and local laws that prohibit all forms of racial discrimination and nepotistic hiring guidelines. Do black men have to bleed profusely or have their sliced fingers publicly displayed before you see the psychological and social scars carried out by your inaction? But as your public hiring records show and newspapers have revealed; nepotism plays a role in who is hired. Since no blacks are hired, though the back door we can assume that friends and relatives who look like the people in power are quickly hired into these hate circles that share the same racist views. But just like the rich and powerful, you just don’t get it.
You have not adequately monitored the negative rhetoric that keeps blacks from these jobs. White sympathizers to black employees say that this same stereotyped rhetoric gets blacks intentionally fired when white saboteurs act on their hatred. In addition, when employers are forced to obey the affirmative action laws that are their civic responsibility to carry out, they prolong not hiring with guidelines from unions and manufacturing lobbyists. How do you reconcile the blatant truth of spitefulness and hatefulness that keeps blacks from feeding their families, from paying taxes, from being a citizen in a democracy in a country they have helped to build?
By not giving DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS absolute power, you are undermining the death of Dr. Martin Luther King and the sacrifice of Rosa Parks. Society allowed the lynching of Emmett Till and the gassing of Anne Frank. Do you represent blacks in society or do you represent businesses that find you a racist compatriot? Are you helping to tie the noose and turning on the gas or just another anonymous liberal hypocrite of freedom and liberty, who watch as the smoke plumes from the gas chambers disappear from your sight and mind.
It is disconcerting to know a white politician got the black vote because he likes gospel music, Tiger Woods, and chit’lins. The silent protests of institutional racism in Dane County by 100 black men of Madison is synonymous with anti-bellum minstrel music. Black ministers and black professionals have a history of being anonymous to current events that affect their relationship with the established power structure. Even a fleeting association with blacks reveals that white resentment is a racist derangement; a dismal attitude attached to mainstream society. There are 10,000 hate groups on line. Nine hundred and twenty-six white supremacy websites get nearly 10,000 hits a day to celebrate the silent genocide of the black male and Negro/Jew. Isolated incidents of racism are uniformly destructive but you just don’t get it. White supremacy is alive and well in government or why else would it take 60 years and more to resolve what is overt racism and what is courteous impertinence. Both are motivated by the politics of fear and loathing. But you still don’t get it.
This is a struggle between good and evil. You can no longer increase the police budget without seeing the repercussions of decreasing the funding of youth activities that show society does care about them. You must see the liaison between increasing jail space and the increasing education gap. Don’t you think black mothers also want their new born sons to have the skills necessary to work on a road crew, to sit in that office cubicle, to finance a loan? Nativity is no longer an excuse when you see no black men at your dinner table, as your co-worker or in your church pews. Some suggest that blacks and Jews should just get over it, but they just don’t get it. Racism is a mandate that is consciously or unconsciously supported by your inattention to the truth that people deny the Holocaust happened; people also deny that lynching, raping, castrating, and dismembering black men was an instant holiday for white people. (Recently a judge dropped charges against two white men for dragging a black man behind a truck until he was dismembered because the evidence was pulverized.) People deny that prison factory towns are dependent upon the courts to keep the townspeople employed; the probation officer regurgitating inmates also keeps his job and local police are counterfeiting evidence with propaganda that hides the lowering crime rate. When will the police department have to hold a rummage sale for money to buy M-16 semi-automatic rifles and students get issued new books from tax money instead of 10 year old recycled pamphlets?
What are your principles? What is your strategy to right 400 years of scientifically applied racism that kept black men from owning rural farmland, owning their own business, or working like any other man alongside any other man? Well, let me say that I’m disappointed in the intelligence of the council and I’m not going to stand by and watch ignorant selflessness keep black men unemployed. You can join me in the fight against this ingrained evil or you can take the consequences of a retaliatory federal government.
The transparency of the Obama administration dictates efficiency. Federal funded projects in the city of Madison can come under the scrutiny of everyday citizens. To emphasize the continued racist hiring policies of private and public contractors, I have enlisted volunteers to apply for jobs with organizations receiving federal funding. As you know, the publication of projects using federal funds allows me to research past and current federally funded projects that historically physically/mentally abuse, while under utilizing, under employing, and under paying black employees.
Researchers have been assigned to video record working areas for visually accompaniment of DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS/EEO records. Public resources that reveal the number of years and failed attempts at hiring and retaining black men are also available at public and private institutions. I am in direct correspondence with Sharon D. Eller, Director of Civil Rights for the Department of the Interior and Mary N. Whigham Jones, Deputy Director, Departmental Office of Civil Rights within the Department of Transportation, who will be constantly updated about hiring and firing policies of public and private entities who use American Recovery and Reinvestment of 2009 funds.
I have social contacts with representatives from the following agencies who report one common consistency; the unemployed black male:
* Schools and homeless school liaisons;
* Workforce centers;
* Employment counselors (welfare to work programs);
* Property managers, landlord groups, and tenants’ associations;
* Housing courts and legal aid agencies;
* County veterans’ services offices and other veterans’ services offices;
* Multifamily housing associations;
* Discharge planning departments at jails, prisons, and mental health, chemical dependency, and other institutions;
* Probation offices;
* Domestic violence service providers;
* Food shelves and soup kitchens;
* The faith community;
* Housing authorities;
* Family support centers;
* Police;
* Child welfare agencies;
* Head Start and Early Head Start; and
* Consumer Advocate Groups.
The unemployment rate in the black community is twice as high as the general citizenry because of temporary employment, and those who are so disillusioned by the continuum of subtle racism, they no longer look for work. Linking black people with jobs funded by the economic stimulus package will address their other needs and defy the hopelessness, depression, and gloominess that helplessly accompany sustained poverty.
This is a patriotic mission that begins when I applied for three jobs offered by DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS. I contacted the contractors with a formal application, a resume, and a cover letter. With no forth coming reply I telephoned and left messages. When it was clearly obvious that procrastination of their reply was meant to discourage me, I contacted the DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS office and was told while private contractors doing city work were supposed to hire black employees, they could not enforce the rules and contractors simply ignored the rules because they knew a penalty if any would be slight and hidden from public scrutiny.
While working as a union apprentice, I stated to the Work Force and Development representative that while I did not being used as the mule, I certainly wanted to apply my skills to the job; she replied that because I was a black male I was ‘lucky to be working at all, and be thankful for the bull work I get.’ When applying to the State Division of Rehabilitation for re-training or additional training, I submitted strategic long term technical plans to secure additional training and employment in my field. All ideas were met by white South African raised state employees who were publicly skeptical of my intellectual ability as a skilled black man.
If you think I am frustrated, you are the pompous liberal jerk everyone says you are. I am disillusioned that the prophecies of our Jeffersonian democracy have almost soured by 36 years of bitter Brownshirt behavior towards blacks that was sanctioned by Democrats and well meaning Republicans. Because of the new king of the hill, I do believe that messages of inclusiveness will be welcome by this cabinet. But unless someone takes responsibility to insure that tests are multi-intelligent; that police do not stereotype perpetrators, and that city governments spend federal money according to the Constitution and the by-laws of the tax-stimulus package, I guess it will be moi’ looking over your shoulder for continued proof of your infidelity to humanity. Because three years ago I wrote and commented on the discrepancy in hiring policies by city contractors, but you failed to see the decades long pattern. You just don’t get it.
If you wish to receive copies of testimonials sent to dept of interior and dept of transportation, please contact a local social service agency listed above. Because reporting discrimination reports are binded by time constraints, technical jargon, and job loss retaliation that dissuades victims from filing discrimination reports, I cannot promise victims will allow the release of their names to local officials. Nevertheless, you will not torpedo Affirmative Action/Equal Employment Opportunity programs on my watch. Obama has received hundreds of death threats, black Americans have experienced thousands upon thousands of hate crime; are these individual acts a coincidence or unorganized conspiracy? It is no wonder that the few blacks who are gainfully employed put blinders on to protect themselves from white retaliation. (I refer you to the Home Security Report on Domestic Surveillance) Pro-business does not mean anti-black, otherwise you would of insisted that business tax write-offs include obeying federal hiring policies when using federal funds. As your voting records show, pro-business at the expense of the underemployed and overworked is a trend.
Some of us water our horse at the same trough, but you have made the waters murky with your proposal that naively believes in morals and virtues. If you look closely upon the waves of change, you will see the image of Emmett Till looking up at you with a truth all black men still experience in the 21st Century. If you read Anne Frank, you know the pain from extremists is real in business and government.
Thank you for your time.
thomasjasengardner
thomasjasen@gmail.com
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