It’s been a while.  When you’re a doctor you end up saying that a lot, especially around friends. Like most black folk, after the initial rage at the Trayvon shooting subsides we reflect on our lives and blessings start thinking about other shit we’re mad about. Mine is health disparities.  Perhaps they are related.  I mean if you had a statistical reason to believe that any meal could be your last before being gunned down by a cop or being wrongfully incarcerated perhaps chicken and ribs would be an appropriate diet.   I have no idea what Simon eats (I am a lousy girlfriend) but subconsciously I am sure I don’t worry about it as much because he’s white. How messed up is that?

As I slave away at my fellowship, becoming a full-fledged doctor in my chosen field is within site.  But I am 32. And I am still poor.  My finance major friends are at a point where there investments yield interest that is equivalent to my salary.  But hey, at least I am helping people right? Well sorta.  Patients.  One at a time. Who would be helped by someone else who would have gotten this spot in this fellowship if I didn’t exist.  I would have preferred to work in policy where my work had the potential to help many people and couldn’t have been accomplished by some other shmuck willing to stay in school until they were 40.

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I have been asked to comment on the recent NY Times piece: To Be Black at Stuyvesant High.  Below are my thoughts:

I tried not to write about it.  I didn’t want to be just another liberal blogger uninentionally calling attention to the “birther” movement and thereby adding legitimacy to it in the subconscious minds of many Americans who vote.  When the White House went above and beyond any legal requirement of any American citizen to do anything (not to mention presidential candidate, not to mention sitting president) and released his long-form birth certificate I patted myself on the back for staying out at least one pointless debate.  And now they want his college records.  And of course the birthers are not satisfied with the long-form birth certificate.

So let’s go over what we know.  Birthers are racist, and not the pseudo-intellectual “there exist some gifted negroes but as a race they are intellectually inferior” but the “there are just some things nobody with mongrel blood should ever, ever do and being president is damn sure one of them.” All Republicans, racist or not, know that birthers are racist and deliberately pander to this group for political points by pretending that the birthers really care where Obama was born not as much what he looks like and who he was born to.  Polls indicate that over half of people who identify themselves as Republicans don’t believe Obama is American or aren’t sure.  Believe it or not, I can live with that.  Or rather, I have to – I’m black in America.

But here’s what makes me angry.  It’s the fact that so many people, with nothing to gain to from this slander and libel against the President, don’t get angry and don’t stand up to make any sort of change.  Case in point: If you haven’t struck up a conversation with an acquaintance or stranger about how absurd this birther thing is, then guess what? Black or white, you’ve failed the racism/self-hatred test. 

Ok, let’s back up.  Raise your hand if you’ve overheard a birther talking on the bus or in a bar sounding all authorative like he’s king shit of fuck mountain?  Yeah all right, all of you.  Now, raise your hand if you’ve EVER heard someone DENOUNCING birtherism loudly and in the same manner? Now put your hand down if you’re at a small liberal arts college North of the Mason Dixon line with no division 1 or division 2 athletics.  Yeah, not a single hand raised.

Look people.  It’s 2011.  We know that progress isn’t guaranteed with the passing of time.  We’ve seen slavery, holocaust, genocide and the like.  It’s not just that we know what our primal demons are like, we also know, as people how extremely cowardly we are.  I mean, you won’t come to the defense of the President of the United States? Your President? Supposedly the most powerful person in the world?  If not then guess what, you’re not coming to the defense of the gay kid who is being bullied.  You’re not coming to the defense of the Hispanic-American who is having his citizenship questioned by an angry mob.  Come on people, we need to start controlling how the masses think.

Oh, you’re one of those “you can’t control how people think” people are you?  Ever heard of advertising? Your deepest most sacred convictions are bought, sold, bundled, divided and sold again every day on Wall Street.  Your very concept of what it means to be American is 80% commercials you’ve watched during Major League Sports.

So read a book, figure out what your convictions are, and PLEASE don’t just STAND UP for them if they get attacked in front of you.  Convictions aren’t to be used for self-defense only.  ADVOCATE for them.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I hate stupid people as much as the next guy.  But you know what I hate even more?  A coward.

This topic deserves more than the brief illusion I gave to it in a previous post.  The American Civil War had just one cause: slavery.  States Rights is a myth.  Why does that matter 150 years after Fort Sumter? Because the Civil War made Americans who we are today, and in my opinion was simply the final military battle in what is called the American Revolution.  It created a vast country without borders – states because not a body of people but simply a necessary and subservient level of government.  Then of course we have the shame issue.

The shame associated with such a devasted defeat and a disproportionate share of the blame for the greatest atrocity man ever inflicted upon man.  The Civil War was less a war fought to free slaves as it was a war to pay for them.  Lincoln knew this as he said days before his own blood was placed on the alter of freedom with Brown’s and the 625,000 that died in between.  To understand this I offer an analogy.

Suppose eating meat and cheese (aka) animal slavery is wrong.  Who commits the greatest sin? He who keeps a single cow per year, sells the cheese and then slaughters the cow selling the meat, or the man who dines on steak and brie every night, but had never seen a cow in the flesh? Who refuses to even make the association? After the war each side had its own myth to create – The Lost Cause/States Rights folks of the South and the Freedman’s Army in the North.  Ironically, John Brown Free Soilers and Jayhawks are reviled by both sides …everywhere other than Kansas.

But it was the slaves stupid.  Everyone knew it at the time. The founding fathers knew it would come to this.  And somewhere, in their heart of hearts, every American for the last 150 years have known it.  If every mortal deed echoes through eternity, the cannons of the Civil War and still be heard loudly no matter how tightly we cover our ears and try and sing above the noise.

I’m one of those guys who constantly gets accused of making everything about race.  Everything from healthcare to the judiciary system, employment prospects to school admissions.  I’ve had a lot of discussions over a lot of beers and every now and then I get tired of being the only voice answering the meant-to-be rhetorical question underlying all these conversations “ok, you’ve got a black president, what more could you POSSIBLY want?” I begin to doubt myself, just a little, and then I read about Kyle Bristow’s “White Apocalypse,” a novel which the author insists isn’t a racist fantasy and it renews my resolve to at the very least not give the slight nod white people look for after a borderline statement to see if you’re one of those “reasonable” colored folk.  But here’s what’s interesting.  The racist fantasy is also a revenge fantasy.

The novel supposedly begins with the discovery of a mass grave…filled with white people.  Ancient white people who somehow got to the North American continent before Native Americans presumably by crossing a frozen Atlantic Ocean. Then the Native Americans slaughtered them, millenia pass, and suddenly directors of the Southern Poverty Law Center are being assassinated and self-hating white people are exercising their liberal guilt by dating non-whites.  Ok, so obviously Bristow (who sure as hell is no looker) lost a girlfriend (or more likely crush) to a black guy.  Sexual insecurity has long been a hallmark of racism, particularly American racism.

Read on to find out what makes this book extra special

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So Benito has been trying to recruit an underemployed blogger to join our motley crew, but is failing because obviously none of the candidates want to lose their job. But one of them did pass on a mandatory assignment a senior manager gave to his underlyings before the monthly meeting when they were to pay homage to his greatness. Read “A Letter to Garcia.” Here is the damn link

http://www.birdsnest.com/garcia.htm

I talked to the guy and he said he was hurt that his manager thought so little of them collectively that he would make them read what amounted a treatise on how they were so worthless as to be morally bankrupt human beings. Or at least that’s what he got out of it. You are probably wondering what this has to with Scalia. Getting to that.

My first reaction was this kid is a major loser if his managers have any ability to affect him emotionally. So I read the article…turns out it’s a turn of the (previous) century essay, penned on a lark, a 100 yr-old blog entry that could have been written by Rush Limbaugh. Then I got angry.
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I am not the biggest fan of kids.  I did my rotation through pediatrics and was told I’d be a good pediatrician because I didn’t let emotions get in the way of medicine, and because children are more comfortable with a female doctor.  Pass.  One of the things I did notice though was that there were alot of fat kids.  Half of the kids were in my humble opinion fat enough to be the “fat” kid in their respective class, the one with no friends that everyone poked fun at.  My thought is that an anti-obesity campaign is so benign as to be almost useless.  Michelle Obama is a beautiful, empowered, intelligent woman who could raise awareness about any number of issues.  Then I heard about Rush Limbaugh, a morbidly obese, fat drug addict, attacking the first lady over her anti-obesity campaign.  This indicates the type of bald-faced hatred that still permeates a great deal of the 48% of the country that did not vote for Obama.

I do not know exactly why I found Limbaugh’s commentary to be so much more offensive than Sarah Palin’s similar comments.  Palin constantly goes out of her way to take shots at the first lady, going as far as to dedicate a plate of smores to her in the defiant act of eating dessert.  Sadly, I suspect the reason for this is that Sarah Palin, who is losing her battle with age, is still in far better shape than Rush Limbaugh.  The hypocrisy of a man who can lose well over 50 lbs and not look any different criticizing someone for combating childhood obesity cuts through my political apathy and strikes me as absurd.  It also demonstrates that I was wrong about two things.  First, that the first lady should have taken on something more concrete, and two, that childhood obesity isn’t such a big deal.

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Clarence Thomas is only the second African-American ever to sit on the Supreme Court.  He was nominated by the first President Bush when Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American ever to sit on the Supreme Court, retired.  I do not care for Clarence Thomas.  Neither do 98% of African-Americans – ever since he first caught Reagan’s eye for being willing to perpetuate lies about African-Americans and his systematic destruction of the EEOC.  Twenty years later, he sits alienated and alone on the court, under a self-imposed vow of silence.  After his wife accepted over $700,000 to lobby against President Obama’s groundbreaking Healthcare reform, Thomas stands poised to cast the deciding vote rendering a law unconstitutional, purely on political grounds, that will directly cause the death of hundreds of thousands of the poorest Americans.  Ladies and gentleman I give you Clarence Thomas, the first Student Debtor.

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When your life is in shambles and the road from ruin is uphill and rocky there is a tendency for our brethren to convince themselves that the flatter road with smoother terrain also (might) lead to a safe place.  In other words, once we discover the real villain, we often decide this person is too powerful so we instead decide to pick on the gimpy blind kid who was just minding his own business.  It happens. We’re not perfect. However, sometimes we see two knights in battle, one for us and one against us, and we side with the one against us…not because we are frustrated with our own knight’s performance (which is what we claim) but because we can hurt our own knight more and we yearn to matter, or at least feel like we do. Now THIS is dangerous.

It is becoming somewhat chic for debtors, hipsters and young people to criticize Obama, essentially for not being the biblical messiah.  They use this criticism to justify their lack of participation in the political process and when criticized are quick to tell you how many doors they knocked on in 2008 and what Obama owes them, etc, etc.
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I decided to do a little mentoring in honor of Black History Month so I went back to my undergrad Alma mater and sat on one of those panels for one of those events only uncool freshman and officers in the Black Student Alliance go to. Not surprisingly I was not the only doctor there. One of my colleagues, when asked what was the difference between the kids who got through (med school) and those that didn’t, replied “we’re all donkeys following a carrot on a stick. The ones that make it never stop and eat the grass all around them.” When asked to elaborate he said “we’re also not the ones who starve to death.”

It was the only insightful poignant thing said in a discussion that revolved around numbers and the giant elephant in the room- which of course was how to address the plethora of concealed discriminatory tactics meant to keep blacks away from math and science and pursuing careers in this necessary field.

Therein of course lies the dilemma of the black student. For the white student, after you’ve followed the carrot for a reasonable length of time hell, eat some grass. You only live once. The black student has no such luxury. Why? Because we remember our forefathers who DID NOT get to live once, and to honor their legacy we will follow the carrot until we collapse so long as we don’t see Jim Crow’s son on our backs with the pole and string.

It’s hard to decide whether to confront the younger generation with the truth. They should have the benefit of the knowledge earned with the broken lives of our greatest minds but knowing the truth comes at a price and that price is madness.

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