DEBRADICKERSON.COM

Happy Memorial Day! You racists.

Debra J Dickerson — Sun, 26 May 2013 18:10:39 GMT

I didn't think there was anything left for me to take racial offense at, but, just in time, something new: "How Memorial Day was stripped of its African American roots."

According to Dominion of new York:

"What we now know as Memorial Day began as “Decoration Day” in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. It was a tradition initiated by former slaves to celebrate emancipation and commemorate those who died for that cause...

At 9 a.m. on May 1, the procession stepped off led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses.

Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathered in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens’ choir sang “We’ll Rally around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture."

You have to wonder if we'll ever look our racist past in the face and finally be done with it.

Are we our DNA?

Debra J Dickerson — Sun, 26 May 2013 17:27:08 GMT

President Obama is descended from America's very first official slave, John Punch who (Wikipedia tells us) "was an indentured servant in Colonial Virginia who fled to escape servitude in 1640. After he was caught, his punishment was enslavement for life. Punch’s is the first documented case of slavery for life in the colonies, occurring decades before slavery laws were enacted in Virginia."

And through his white mother, no less. You should read the Wikipedia page. Fascinating.

Vanessa Williams has also had her DNA analyzed and says, "my DNA breaks down as follows: I’m 23% from Ghana, 17% from the British Isles, 15% from Cameroon, 12% Finnish, 11% Southern European, 75 Togo (sic), 6% Benin, 5% Senegal and 4% Portuguese." She's planning a world tour to visit "where [she's] from".

But in what way is she from Finland, let alone Ghana?

Fascinating.

Occupy's 1 year anniversary, the debate, a documentary

Debra J Dickerson — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 23:58:52 GMT

One of the main reasons I struggle with the business of writing is my lack of interest in self-promotion. I don't mind being promoted, I just suck at it. But, since its six minutes away, I thought I'd mention being in a great documentary on PBS called Race 2012. Guess what it's about. Watch it then stay tuned for the second Presidential debate. Or first, if we're juding by Obama's performance last time around.

I talk about Occupy in the documentary, so you might be interested in this interview I did with the excellent Michel Martin on its first year anniversary at NPR's Tell Me More.

People keep asking, so here's a way to donate

Debra J Dickerson — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 04:12:16 GMT

For some reason, I stopped getting the emails that notify me when someone's commented; my apologies for ignoring you. Some of those comments were about trying to donate but not having a way to do so. Every few months, I try to add a PayPal widget to the site, then give up. I actually got the button to appear, after an hour, but you can click it all you want; nothing will happen. PayPal's desperate for it's cut, so here's a link if you want to donate while I try to find a 12 year old to make this widget work.

Thanks for giving a damn.

The Emperor's new clothes: A person of privilege tells it like it is

Debra J Dickerson — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 03:07:21 GMT

Wow. This piece blows my mind. I want to say, it's not often that the privileged acknowledge it but that fact is that it's far from 'not often'. It's 'almost never'. Most even get offended when you point out the obvious fact of it.

I remember watching ER once, when the Dr. John Carter character was musing ruefully outside a Skid Row hovel-office building. Not a care in the world. Laughing to himself in the pitch black, all white and rich and stuff, his back to the street. A patrol car pulls up, not to confront him as he stands there laughing about nothing and staring at an empty building in the middle of the night, but to asks him if he's OK and, sure, of course he is. Thanks for asking. He barely turns to them, barely acknowledges their presence. He's the King to their palace guards. They sincerely warn him to be careful and drive off as he continues to muse about the rascally old white man (Ed Asner, I believe) who'd conned him.

I had the hots for Dr. Carter, but even so I was thrown totally out of the story; I actually feared for the fool (I know. Hyper-imaginative much?). But he had not a moment's thought that he'd be robbed or assaulted; they didn't even have him check his surroundings occasionally or have brought a friend with him. Who wouldn't have sat in their locked car -- it was cold -- had they no choice but to stare at a building in a dangerous neighborhood? When the cops came to check on him rather than Rodney King him, I went from vicarious fear to bitter squint-eyes. How nice it must be to walk around the world, all white and rich and male and cossetted by the police. No stop and frisk for him (what the hell would he have been doing in that neighborhood at that hour except buying drugs or sex?). This is why I think I know what George Zimmerman was feeling when he saw Trayvon walking around all Free And Unfraid While Black: Oh hell no! Not this time.

This is why minorities, perhaps, should not be allowed guns; you never know which random insult will be that one too many.

I'm a writer and a voracious reader; I can suspend disbelief with the best of them, but every now and then the weight of world's war against the Earth's meek bleeds all the romance out of me. You just get tired of being required, day in and day out, to press your face up against the glass of rich, white, and/or male privilege. No person of color could have written such a scene without retching and only rich, well-educated white men, men so privileged they sniff at the rules of the ghetto, could have. I've often said that pop culture is how America dreams. Well, we all know what happens in dreams, don't we? The truth comes out.

That's why this Princeton commencement speech by Michael Lewis (upon whom I've had a professional crush since 1996) is one for the ages; he doesn't kid himself that his wild success in life, however much he rocks as a writer, is anything but pure luck. Boy, I bet half the audience was livid. yay!

Julia LaRoche, of Business Insider, writes that, "Michael Lewis says that he's really, really lucky.

He graduated from Princeton University with a degree in art history and soon after enrolled ingraduate school at the London School of Economics.

Lewis eventually landed a job on Wall Street at Salomon Brothers and would later become a very famous, award-winning author ("Liar's Poker," "The Blind Side" and "Moneyball").

However, during his remarks atPrinceton's Baccalaureate he said that all his fame and fortune are a matter of luck and the same goes for other successful people.

These are two of his key points.

He said that success is "always rationalized" because successful people don't want to acknowledge that they were actually just really lucky. What's more is, the world doesn't want to realize that either.
Lewis told the Princeton graduates that if they are successful then they should recognize that they also were very lucky. That said, "You owe a debt, not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky."

Here's his speech he gave. [via Princeton University]

"Don't Eat Fortune's Cookie"
Michael Lewis
June 3, 2012 — As Prepared

Thank you. President Tilghman. Trustees and Friends. Parents of the Class of 2012. Above all, Members of the Princeton Class of 2012. Give yourself a round of applause. The next time you look around a church and see everyone dressed in black it'll be awkward to cheer. Enjoy the moment.

Thirty years ago I sat where you sat. I must have listened to some older person share his life experience. But I don't remember a word of it. I can't even tell you who spoke. What I do remember, vividly, is graduation. I'm told you're meant to be excited, perhaps even relieved, and maybe all of you are. I wasn't. I was totally outraged. Here I’d gone and given them four of the best years of my life and this is how they thanked me for it. By kicking me out.

At that moment I was sure of only one thing: I was of no possible economic value to the outside world. I'd majored in art history, for a start. Even then this was regarded as an act of insanity. I was almost certainly less prepared for the marketplace than most of you. Yet somehow I have wound up rich and famous. Well, sort of. I'm going to explain, briefly, how that happened. I want you to understand just how mysterious careers can be, before you go out and have one yourself.

I graduated from Princeton without ever having published a word of anything, anywhere. I didn't write for the Prince, or for anyone else. But at Princeton, studying art history, I felt the first twinge of literary ambition. It happened while working on my senior thesis. My adviser was a truly gifted professor, an archaeologist named William Childs. The thesis tried to explain how the Italian sculptor Donatello used Greek and Roman sculpture — which is actually totally beside the point, but I've always wanted to tell someone. God knows what Professor Childs actually thought of it, but he helped me to become engrossed. More than engrossed: obsessed. When I handed it in I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life: to write senior theses. Or, to put it differently: to write books.

Then I went to my thesis defense. It was just a few yards from here, in McCormick Hall. I listened and waited for Professor Childs to say how well written my thesis was. He didn't. And so after about 45 minutes I finally said, "So. What did you think of the writing?"

"Put it this way" he said. "Never try to make a living at it."

And I didn't — not really. I did what everyone does who has no idea what to do with themselves: I went to graduate school. I wrote at nights, without much effect, mainly because I hadn't the first clue what I should write about. One night I was invited to a dinner, where I sat next to the wife of a big shot at a giant Wall Street investment bank, called Salomon Brothers. She more or less forced her husband to give me a job. I knew next to nothing about Salomon Brothers. But Salomon Brothers happened to be where Wall Street was being reinvented—into the place we have all come to know and love. When I got there I was assigned, almost arbitrarily, to the very best job in which to observe the growing madness: they turned me into the house expert on derivatives. A year and a half later Salomon Brothers was handing me a check for hundreds of thousands of dollars to give advice about derivatives to professional investors.

Now I had something to write about: Salomon Brothers. Wall Street had become so unhinged that it was paying recent Princeton graduates who knew nothing about money small fortunes to pretend to be experts about money. I'd stumbled into my next senior thesis.

I called up my father. I told him I was going to quit this job that now promised me millions of dollars to write a book for an advance of 40 grand. There was a long pause on the other end of the line. "You might just want to think about that," he said.

"Why?"

"Stay at Salomon Brothers 10 years, make your fortune, and then write your books," he said.

I didn't need to think about it. I knew what intellectual passion felt like — because I'd felt it here, at Princeton — and I wanted to feel it again. I was 26 years old. Had I waited until I was 36, I would never have done it. I would have forgotten the feeling.

The book I wrote was called "Liar’s Poker." It sold a million copies. I was 28 years old. I had a career, a little fame, a small fortune and a new life narrative. All of a sudden people were telling me I was born to be a writer. This was absurd. Even I could see there was another, truer narrative, with luck as its theme. What were the odds of being seated at that dinner next to that Salomon Brothers lady? Of landing inside the best Wall Street firm from which to write the story of an age? Of landing in the seat with the best view of the business? Of having parents who didn't disinherit me but instead sighed and said "do it if you must?" Of having had that sense of must kindled inside me by a professor of art history at Princeton? Of having been let into Princeton in the first place?

be sure to read the rest

Skin privilege in action: whites and affirmative action

Debra J Dickerson — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:04:15 GMT

No matter how many times America goes deaf when this is pointed out, it remains no less true: the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action are, and always have been, white women. Not african americans. Not women. White women. If even 10% of America - minorities included- know this, hats will be eaten. Here's a perfect example, especially of the kind of affirmative action that moves a minority group from 'have not' to 'have' and beyond mere tokenism. From The Daily Beast (and the never ending fascination with Mad Men and its season premiere):

"At Newsweek, A cover story on “Women in Revolt” appeared on newsstands in 1970 the same day women at the magazine held a news conference announcing they were suing for gender discrimination. The class action, launched by a half-dozen researchers in New York, was ultimately joined by 46 women. The editor, Osborn Elliott, a fine journalist who thought of himself as a progressive, was both surprised and truly hurt by the women’s action. ..."

"Newsweek had been focused on civil rights and the growing antiwar movement, and by the time the male editors got around to the [white] women’s movement, discontent within the magazine had taken hold and legal redress was essential. An affirmative-action plan opened up opportunities that I could never have imagined, and after an internship I was assigned to cover Jimmy Carter’s bid for the White House, which brought me to Washington, where I have been ever since. It’s my [Eleanor Clift's] Cinderella story, and it’s an era that Mad Men captures in all its dimensions. A lot of positive social change took place, the result of struggles waged by many people whose names don’t make it into the history books. To be part of it in even a small way sure was fun."

And remunerative. Wonder how many black women were working at Newsweek then, and of them, how many got to ride this gravy train to the heights of journalism.

My latest at Slate: Why is it funny for a five year old to joke about being beaten?

Debra J Dickerson — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 22:43:47 GMT

At Slate: "The first thing adorable 5-year-old Isaiah “Zay Zay” Fredericks explains in "Growing Up Black" is that his dad is "Joe Jackson, but with a little more love." Second, that "black parents yell too much," which he then demonstrates:

Shut up! Go to bed! Come here! Shut up! Go to bed! Sit down! I love you. Get in the tub! I'm gonna punch you in the face. All they do is yell. Can't y'all talk some times? Talk sweetly to me. I'm just a little baby boy.

Hearing “I’m gonna punch you in the face” come from the same tiny little mouth that would have to absorb the blow made me flinch and push my chair away."

I hate corporal punishment. A lot. I never fail to become nauseated when the subject arises, having grown up with it, so when I saw this "comedy" bit from a day care kid, I had to speak up. So I did.

Note: I don't read comments because of the idiots, but my friends do so as to alert me to anything disturbing, like this -- my son went through a phase in which he liked to tie things to other things, including himself and anyone who sat still long enough -- arms, legs, ankles, his neck, your neck. He tried his ears once, but his batman cape wouldn't stay on them. Anything to which something could be tied. He liked connecting things -- like bread bag twist ties fastening crayons to building blocks -- and he liked knots, tying them and untying them. It was a dangerous habit when body parts were involved, so I did what I had to to make him stop. No, readers: he wasn't trying to hang himself or anyone else. Do I strike you as stupid enough to publicize it if he had been, or to punish a child in a situation like that? He was, like, tying stuff to other stuff -- Legos to remote control cars, dolls onto a balloon's string, etc. Geez.

Say hello to my little friend

Debra J Dickerson — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 20:08:58 GMT

Daniel Murphy as he unselfishly spends three minutes shooting the breeze with the NYPD. Now would be a good time to listen. It's kinda neat.

8,389

I spent December 2011 - January 2012 'surfing' six different occupies in the NE and shared floor space with this guy along the way once his OWS group and I landed in New Hampshire to Occupytheprimary. Like most occupiers, he's exceedingly young and wonderful and omniscient. I learned to smile indulgently and say nothing while they eye-rolled their way through centuries of history during which their forebears had done absolutely nothing correctly (except give them life, presumably). It was pretty amusing. Until, blase, Daniel pointed out that "the civil rights movement" had accomplished nothing. "Look at the millions of black men in prison." He actually said this when his back was turned to me and I would have had no trouble throttling him with my long johns. But, for the sake of the mission, I decided to let him live. I can always strangle him later.

Occupy is notable for so many things but two of them are these: a) my, oh my, how we do love to talk. There aren't a dozen souls among us who can tolerate silence for longer than, oh, about thirteen seconds before it must be filled with our brilliance. These kids stay up so late facebooking and debating (they uptwinkle in their sleep), at 4 am once, I said, in all sincerity, "If that light doesn't goo off soon, I'm going to cry. I swear."

b) my real point, of course, is my wonderment at all the crazy relationships we're forming, in patterns no one would have ever been able to predict. I see occufamily from that trip on livestream regularly and we stay in touch. I checked on a couple who were getting arrested almost daily, which reminded them to ask for help finding places to crash in DC, where I have many non-occupy friends I fully expect to quasi-adopt them, too. They took care of me, now I'm taking care of them.

It makes me almost giddy trying to figure out how these relationships-that-never-should-have-happened will affect the future of the country. And the world; an OccuRussian visited Vegas recently and now I'm in regular contact with him and a friend in Ufa and we're arguing over who will visit who first.

Look out 1%: the old divide and conquer won't work on us anymore.

Combat Camera: The Year's Best Military Photography

Debra J Dickerson — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 19:22:04 GMT

1 / 20

Service members from the Iraq Air Force and U.S. Air Force show off for each other atop a hardened aircraft shelter at Sather Air Base in Iraq while doing a joint patrol of the flight line.

From FP

Pointless, undeserved NYPD violence against Occupy Wall Street

Debra J Dickerson — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 22:45:34 GMT

But can you non-occupiers see that it's not just against us but against anyone and any group that would dare to behave as if they were really free instead of just rhetorically so? Today, Occupy Wall Street. Tomorrow, Mothers Against Drunk Driving were they to dare to take to the streets without permission. They only care about two things: letting the military and paramilitary forces know that they'll always be employed and well funded, and, most importantly, reminding us who's in control. We know that's true because they're kicking white ass, too this time and putting no effort in to minimizing the damage. We're all niggers to the 1%, we always have been, and therefore have no business daring to think for ourselves.

Here's a round-up photo cache from today's OWS anti-police brutality march, via Demotix.

The 1% is so dumb, so greedy, so fascist, and so bloody entitled, it has no idea that, eventually, the cops are going to join us in the revolt. Sadly, I don't think that will be until a few Occupiers get killed which I predict to be no later than the end of May (we've planned non-stop actions for then). And when they do, they'll be among our most effective. Til then though, more of this.

Want to see a middle-aged American in a NYPD headlock for protesting peacefully?

Debra J Dickerson — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 21:41:33 GMT

or apeaceful march blocked so as to make arresting law abiding citizens more efficient?

You're welcome.