Trying To Trap A Freeman

In the immortal words of Adm. Akbar......



And that precisely what this is:

Dear Mr. Freeman,

My name is Ali Akbar. I’m a 26 year-old African-American small business owner and a tea party activist. I’m not writing to rake you over the coals in the way that many conservatives have done in the last 48 hours. Heck, I wrote a passionate open-letter refuting many of your claims already, but this is not that. This is an honest and standing invitation. I do believe that you are wrong in what you said about the tea party, but I would rather prove it to you than castigate you for your comments.

I also understand that your reflexive comments came from experience. You grew up in a different America than the one that I was blessed to be born into. We both grew up in the south, but I never saw ‘White Only’ signs. I’ve been called a name or two in my three decades, but racism has always been the exception in my life, not the rule, as it probably was in your youth. I understand your suspicion of conservative political movements. It is rooted in pain and fear and memory, and though I never saw the horrors of segregation that you did, we share that cultural heritage.


I’ve been a fan of yours all my life. From “Driving Miss Daisy” to “Lean on Me” to “The Shawshank Redemption,” I idolized you as a boy. Growing up without a father, you were one of the strong black men in my life who gave me a model to follow. Each of the characters you played had dignity and confidence. I tried to emulate the strength you projected. While many of my friends headed down the all-too-familiar path of drugs, unwed pregnancies and crime, I’ve striven to live a life with dignity, be an example for my brothers and make my mother proud.

My favorite of your movies was “The Power of One.” I must’ve watched it a hundred times, crying every time when your character Geel Piet was killed by the racist South African. Geel Piet was brave and heroic, even in the face of death, because he knew that the hate that killed him was a trifle in comparison to the love that PK’s anti-apartheid movement was spreading. It is with that spirit that I’m writing to you this morning.

I’ve attended dozens of tea party events. I’ve helped organize them, and I’ve even spoken at a few. The tea party is not what is often depicted in the news. It is people of all colors who are terribly concerned about the direction that America is heading. We don’t trust big government to make decisions for us. And we fear that the present administration’s spending is going to lead our country down a path to insolvency, much like what Greece is currently facing.

Yes, the Tea Bagger is actually named Akbar.

This is on par with high school kids cleaning up their parents house just hours before mom and dad arrive home from their long weekend, making sure that there are no empty beer cans and bottles of Jagermeister; no ash-trays filled with remnants of blunts, or stray pairs of lacy undergarments from any of the girls that got tipsy enough to dance on the coffee table. This is exactly what this is.

Of course, Morgan Freeman likely knows this and should speak out to this effect. Does Mr. Akbar actually think that one of the more intelligent and articulate humans on the planet is actually going to fall for such sophomoric pleading? I certainly hope he doesn't. If anything, he should arrive, completely unannnounced and unrecognizable - with hidden camera at the ready - to a Tea Bagger gathering in the near future to get a real sense of what an unsanitized conglomerate this reactionary lot truly is.

I'm certain that Mr. Akbar's intensions - at least deep down inside him somewhere - are well and good, but to see anyone within the African American community, regardless of socio-political stripe; where they live; or what they do for a living, be so blind to the verifiable incidences of unchecked racial animus within the Tea Bagger movement gives me great pause. Are they simply playing the role of ostrich in order to maintain a sense of moral superiority? Or is this something more sinister, that they see it and it doesn't bother them in the lease because it's "not happening to them"?

Regardless, the trap as been set and I'm sure that Morgan Freeman is all too aware of this. And once he doesn't show up, The Modern American Right are going to have their "he was too scared to show up" talking points at the ready. They really are that predictable.

How To Lose Votes

Remember when Herman Cain ( oh, wait, aren't we supposed to call him Herm or Herb now? ) said he would get no less than a third of the black vote?

Let's all watch as that vote magically disappears right before your eyes.



Yep, nothing like telling the black community that a majority of them lack higher brain functions and have no clue that conservative policies are what have kept them down for decades.

Of course, Cain attempts to offer the caveat that it's just 2/3 of blacks in America that suffer under the yolk of Democratic telekinetic suppression, but where is the data to back up this assertion? Oh, I see, Cain just made it up. It's his "anecdotal feedback machine" that he keeps hidden in his suit jacket.

The reality of this is that Cain just made a massive gaffe. All that has to happen now is for the Modern American Right to gin up enough spin to make this sound like a positive for the GOP field, and for Cain more specifically. I'm sure their will be some colorful chart used and Sean Hannity will utilize his own racial invective to back this up by having Eric Rush and Jesse Lee Peterson on as the "token black guys".

I bet Cain's foot tastes like Godfather's Deep Dish Pepperoni.

Holding A Mirror Up To Contextual Edits

While I do oppose racial slurs, I do understand how and why they were/are used in literature and even in modern music. It's all about context - that word that just about every conservative in America loves to use but doesn't understand.

To that end, this is just as bad as the Tea Baggers claiming that no one in their ranks uses racist speech.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Mark Twain wrote that "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." A new edition of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" will try to find out if that holds true by replacing the N-word with "slave" in an effort not to offend readers.

Twain scholar Alan Gribben, who is working with NewSouth Books in Alabama to publish a combined volume of the books, said the N-word appears 219 times in "Huck Finn" and four times in "Tom Sawyer." He said the word puts the books in danger of joining the list of literary classics that Twain once humorously defined as those "which people praise and don't read."

"It's such a shame that one word should be a barrier between a marvelous reading experience and a lot of readers," Gribben said.

Yet Twain was particular about his words. His letter in 1888 about the right word and the almost right one was "the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

The book isn't scheduled to be published until February, at a mere 7,500 copies, but Gribben has already received a flood of hateful e-mail accusing him of desecrating the novels. He said the e-mails prove the word makes people uncomfortable.

Twain is one of our national literary treasures and knew full well what he was doing when penning these masterpieces of work. Those that are attempting to distort the context within the hallowed pages have about as much knowledge of Twain's message as they do of how an analog synth works.

They need to stop destroying American literature.

The reason that I bring up the Tea Baggers and their accurately and clearly documented use of racist language, imagery, and animus of a variety of sorts is because of a posting by none other than one of their greatest apologists - Michelle Malkin:

If it’s Tuesday (or Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, etc., etc.), it’s Political Correctness Run Amok Day in America’s education establishment.

The latest salvo? A publishing house will release p.c.-policed versions of both The Adventures of Huck Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer with the words “nigger” and “Injun” deleted.

The tiresome war on Mark Twain’s novels is older than Al Sharpton’s hair grease. I’m reprinting a piece I wrote about the whitewashers’ attempt to expunge the word “nigger” from Huck Finn in 2001. America’s schoolchildren have been robbed by ignorant censors who are too busy counting Twain’s words to understand them and feckless educators too lazy to teach them.

That last paragraph always brings up a chuckle, as Malkin - and so many more conservatives like her - are telling us that there's "nothing to see here" and that "we don't understand what the Tea Parties are about" - "we" being anyone that has the ability to research the Obama administrations legislative goals, their pasts, and their widely documented actions from a neutral and non-hysterical perspective.

I'm thinking Mrs. Malkin - and anyone else within the Tea Bagger ranks that is twitching in teeth-gnashing rage over this pointless and ridiculous republishing of Twain's work - should consider the irony of their standpoints.

Now, before anyone thinks I'm comparing any Tea Bagger to Twain, it should be clear that Malkin and her easily swayed automatons are the Alan Gribben's and NewSouth Books' of the socio-political realm. While that should be obvious to most, I just thought I'd throw that out there.

Rhetorical Flourishes

Would a more apt title to this be "How To Say Nigger And Still Sound Intellectual"?

Just take a look and you tell me.



The predictable racial invective allowed at Fox"Nation" flows just as freely as D'Souza's poorly constructed thesis.

But it isn't only Dinesh that is on the only one "anti-colonialism" talking-point train. Enter likely Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich:

Gingrich cited a recent column D'Souza wrote in Forbes -- promoting his upcoming book on the theme that Obama's central motivation is to weaken America, viewing it as an evil colonial power: "Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son."

In an interview with ABC News this morning, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs responded to Gingrich by accusing him of trying to appeal to those people "who don't believe the president was born in this country." That is, Gingrich was accused of attempting to use coded language for the birther movement.

"You would normally expect better of somebody who held the position of Speaker of the House but look it is political season and most people will say anything and Newt Gingrich does that on a genuinely, on a regular basis," Gibbs said.

I wouldn't at all say that it's coded any longer, as it is blatantly in your face on a daily basis.

There's lots to be questioned with D'Souza's latest tome, considering the fact that much of his thesis is predicated on an anecdotal error from Obama's book "Dreams Of My Father".

Here, I believe, is where Obama got his skin treatment anecdote. He found it in Fanon and altered the setting and the facts to invent a personal experience instructive about American racism. Barack Obama, meet Tawana Brawley. Obama’s bogus racial incident is reminiscent of the Brawley case, in which Brawley fabricated a story about being a victim of racist assault. But in a way Obama’s lie is worse. Brawley’s fabrications were the product of a troubled 15-year-old, while Obama’s were delivered as an adult in a book that, in some respects, served as his presidential campaign manifesto. Because this is not a trivial deception, we cannot let it pass: It is time for Obama to come clean.

I'm guessing that if any of you have heard Sean Hannity talking about Al Sharpton you will be familiar with the Tawana Brawley incident. But that's another story all together, even though it gave rise to more racial animus from the conservative movement - and continues to.

What Dinesh is not presenting in his argument is that Obama's father was quite literally absent from his life. He is, from my understanding at this point, is relying more on a poor understanding of Obama's book "Dreams" as well as cobbling together pieces of his father's life and attempting to project that onto the son.

This is something that D'Souza should be wary of pursuing, as The Economist reports:

...while I don't have any trouble understanding how Barack Obama thinks, I have a lot of trouble understanding how Dinesh D'Souza thinks. And if I were to try to understand his thinking using the same methods he uses to interpret Mr Obama, I might look to his Indian background, which is where he says he gained his insight into anti-colonialism. Mr D'Souza notes simply that he grew up in Mumbai, but a more complete accounting is that his parents were members of the Christian community in the state of Goa, which was colonised by Portugal. The last name "D'Souza" is a common family name in West Africa, where it indicates that the family is descended from the slave-trading coastal mixed-race elite. In India, however, it indicates that the family likely belongs to the Roman Catholic Brahmins, Hindu Brahmins who were converted by missionaries beginning in the 17th century. Interestingly, the Christian community in Goa retained a Hindu-style caste system, with Catholic Brahmins continuing to discriminate against Catholic dalit or "untouchables", whom they refer to as mahara or chamaar. Elite Catholic Brahmin households in Goa sent their children to Jesuit schools (like the one Mr D'Souza attended) and often spoke Portuguese at home, referring to the main local native language, Konkani, as the lingua des criados ("language of servants").

Goa remained a Portuguese colony until it was annexed by India in 1961, which happens to be the year of Mr D'Souza's birth. Many Goan Christians did not welcome the annexation, fearing they would be subsumed in the Hindu-Muslim mega-state. A later source of anxiety was India's affirmative action (or "reservation") policies, which set aside university slots and civil-service jobs for people from recognised historically stigmatised groups, known as "scheduled castes and tribes". Beginning in the early 1980s, when Mr D'Souza was off studying at Dartmouth, these affirmative-action policies engendered widespread resistance among India's elite classes, who were terrified of losing their privileged status in a colossal country where hundreds of millions of indigents might overwhelm the available spots at top schools (and reduce their kids' chances of, say, going to Dartmouth). Goa itself has set itself up as a redoubt against the reservation policies: it has the fewest scheduled castes and tribes of any Indian state. This is largely because elite Christians have refused to acknowledge discrimination against the Christian dalit, or to allow them to be recognised as a scheduled caste. Pope John Paul II rebuked Indian bishops for these practices on his visit to Goa in 2003.

The way that I read that is that it shows that D'Souza can be framed in the same light that he has placed Obama in - albeit in a ham-fisted and bizarre way, considering that the thesis that simply because a father is one way that that must mean the child will be as such.

But let's look at the racial component in all of this.

Beck has set this up in such a way where he can easily deflect accusations of racism being leveled directly at him, as he is hosting a non-white, non-American-born man of some apparent educational level to make the argument that Obama - for lack of a more polite way of putting it - is an angry negro.

The reality of this is that it's not about how D'Souza's narrative is constructed on hyperbole and conjecture, but how those that will use this information to espouse their racism. It's actually a pretty impressive bit of pre-damage control from the modern conservative media.