[E]ven I a regular person - who happens to be white yet not sullied with the shineboxary of a vegan, activist lawyer - can see that this has more to do with... what was it? Ah, yes... the hate-whitey attitude that Chris Stewart / Rahelio Soleil has against Miinnesotans, Midwest whites, non-blacks, and blacks who he sees as (in his words) "coons".
– badda-blogger at Anti-Strib
I don't usually link to virulent blogs, but to understand at least part of what Rahelio was raging against, you really must read a week or two of posts and especially comments at blogs other than this one. I am not going to dislodge some of those contributors from their pure certainty or their cute flirtations with racist imagery, but at least they keep it over there.
I'm interested in working it out for myself.
I understand charming people do lie. Targets of intolerance are not models of tolerance themselves. Wingers left and right veer across the center line. A fish doesn't know it's wet and a racist thinks he's just a gentle white man trying to make it in this world. Or a black man aggrieved.
You can't tell the players by the program. Hell, you can't tell them by their uniform with their name on the back in four-inch letters. So you have to start with yourself.
Chris Stewart may be full of shit and bada-blogger may be one of the more color-blind people on the planet. A few seconds with them won't straighten you out on the matter.
If you're going to be a decent human being, you have to do the work. But as a decent person, you begin to couch your speech. You know the pictures in your head and the tugs at your gut are wrong. How can you talk honestly about race if you are afraid of saying something that might be called racist ?
If thinking impure thoughts is racism, we are all racists. We are encoded to be. Our DNA forces us to quickly detect who is of our clan and who is not, who might be a friend and who might do us harm.
Civilization tries to jam those ancient signals. You are not going to be clubbed by Alan Page, for chrissakes! Keith Ellison will not betray our country.The Hispanic tree trimmer is not planning to steal my car. That is so ignorant! We know better now. But our lizard brain does not. The Sunni brain does not. The good ole boy brain does not. The Crips brain does not.
Minneapolis police just reclassified the death of student Chris Jenkins a homicide. Halloween night, Jenkins left a Minneapolis bar costumed as an Indian and disappeared. Months later his body was found in the Mississippi — death by suicide or misadventure. Case closed.
Police now believe, four years later, he was murdered.
Imagine how the killer(s) might have followed Jenkins, drunk and vulnerable, from the Warehouse District bar and thrown him off a bridge on the near North side when they discovered he didn't have any money. His costume had no pockets, and his wallet was back in the bar with his girlfriend.
Disgusting, isn't it?
It's like the senseless shooting in Uptown, or the guy hit by a stray bullet half a block from where Jenkins disappeared. The police can't control the city, the streets are not safe, and if it weren't for one dedicated cop, Jenkins' parents would still be in limbo. I hope they catch the bastards. Someone already in prison has started to talk. They should put the screws to him.
Okay, retrieve your mental image of the detective who did not give up on the case, even after the police chief declared it finished. Who was the witness? What did the killers look like?
Could you pick them out of a line up?
Of course not. They're figments of your imagination. And if you live in a city, I'll place odds your killers and the witness were black. Mine were. It was neither voluntary nor contrived. The pictures just popped in place as I read the stories.
Well, now we know the cop was black. We don't yet know the rest about the case. But we know about ourselves. We know we have to watch it, despite our educations and acculturation and sensitivity and best intentions.
That's not all Rahelio was saying, but if you don't get that, you won't be able to hear the rest.
