What shade of Race are we - Part III

Part II

It is hard to entertain the suggestions from the marginalized Anglo-American asking for equality or fairness. One suggestion is how their disadvantages are comparable to or elevated by the attention given to Non-Anglos, the kind usually associated with American racism.  Some of these are affirmative action, civil rights, and political correctness.  Some of these different Anglo cultures have a need to be seen as discriminated, disadvantaged, or limited.  Their barriers or disputes appear to be sharing the same source of pain and economic injustice as non-Anglo cultures.

It is sad that race boxes these marginalized Anglo-American peoples into a stereotype of un-oppressable.  I've had an idea that Anglos can't be disadvantaged or discriminated because by default they are the privileged, rule makers, control brokers, and don't need advocates.   I have to acknowledge that I stereotype and I have my own prejudice against Anglo-Americans.  I think it is has been called reverse racism.  I think is more, a human reaction to victimization.  How a victim might have fear for their victimizer. We may find that reverse racism is more of a protective response rather than an ideology.

We may need to recognize how Anglo-American prestige is more about how greed doesn't discriminate.  Anglo-Americans are starting to see themselves as compromised by their "race", yet that is not the obstacle as much as their loyalty to a neglectful corporate culture.  It might be easier to say that Anglo-American disadvantage is not because they are "White", not because institutions are asked to include a diverse population, but possibly because our institutions refuse to expand and creatively reinvest the wealth in newer communal ways.  Communal ways, that would encourage the replication of effective accessible education, technologies, resources, and lifestyles for more than 38% of the Non-Anglo citizenship (Reeves,R.V.,Joo,N, 2017).

It seems like these marginalized or disadvantaged Anglo-Americans want to blame the interventions our American legislation has provided for discrimination based on xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and prejudice. The support of ethnicities that are not Anglo, struggling through prejudice, are now seeming to be re-attacked.  These Anglo-Americans would rather look at these policies than to look critically at the corporate or capitalist strategies that have evolved to no longer need race as an economic strategic tool.

Corporations can no longer easily compartmentalize a race as superior and depreciate darker people as disposable. This seems to force the once elevated Anglo-American class to now suffer the consequences of corporate neglect, disinterest, greed, and disenfranchisement.  This is something many Black, Latino, Migrants, and Women have experienced regularly.  But it is new to the middle class Anglo-American people.  Its no longer about keeping these people off table, after having to make room for us at the table, now its about asking us to trust that your attitude has matured enough to keep us at table as space shrinks.  Trusting this idea, given the Anglo-American's leadership record on self imposed benevolence and non-malfeasance is near impossible. 

Many corporations have a disregard or loose interest in being responsible to the communities they find themselves harvesting for human resources as soon as their return on investment suffers.  The corporations and executive classes do an effective job of bringing life to communities but struggle with transitions or worse responsibly having to say good bye.  We want to admire these businesses when they bring economic growth and accept how they pick up and move on when there is nothing left to harvest.  Some could argue this is exploitation or abuse.

We need to teach businesses how to die or transition with greater respect for their employees, communities, and environment.  Or at least, learn to not blame civil rights and protections from discrimination when economies flounder.  The economic disregard for community as profits and resources shrink seems to create acceptance for corporate abandonment, neglect, or an exploitative attitude.  And possibly for the first time, these Anglo-Americans are feeling the angst of exploitation.  This seems to lead to blame towards minorities, migrants, and any other susceptible community competing for opportunity.

What if we taught ourselves to look critically at the corporate or capitalist strategies we seem to romanticize. It is scary to be asked to believe that discrimination is gone when so many indicators reveal it's active.  Its sad that some Anglo-Americans deny these indicators or conveniently interpret them in their own advantageous ways.  It distracts from looking deeply at the roots to their own growing disadvantage. The complexity behind how Anglo cultures have manifested competitive advantage and conveniences to economic progress is not hard to present, but it has been nearly impossible for enough Anglo-Americans to acknowledge.  Possibly because oligarchies that have benefited the most were able to camouflage themselves with a loyalty to the concept they called "Race".

The toxic strategies Anglo-American ancestry once leveraged to elevate their status and wealth cannot continue to be ignored.  Some of these strategies, like slavery, barriers to entry, segregation,  preferential education systems, or deregulation need to be seen for what they are and likely will continue to be seen as useful by those who cannot bare to be identified as equal. Blaming these corrective policies ignores how the entire working class are susceptible to these newer, non-race based, forms of exploitation.

As I reflect on civil rights because we recently celebrate Martin Luther King Jr, I find myself blessed to have the clarity and perceptions that help me not need to deny other's beliefs more than I try to understand them.  Some in these Anglo cultures feel a strong resentment for the retributions put in place to remedy the carnage of ethnocentrism, xenophobia, racism, discrimination, genocide, robbery, pollution, and inequality. It is unfortunate that some in these Anglo-American communities want to undo, uninstall, and reintroduce non-Anglo disadvantage as a solution to their disadvantage. What a tragic way to solve problems. I hear it as let us all be equally disadvantaged, when we really have clues to a history that has shown us that birds of a feather will punish less those that have similar feathers.  It is calling past discrimination resolved without having any way of accounting for the present day economic gaps for Black, Latino, Women, and other marginalized peoples.

Part IV

I am a brown paper bag

The luminarias, more commonly known as faralitos to other New Mexicans, begin to take shape, lining up next to the wheel barrow filled with dirt. Usually two scoops of dirt from an old soda cup will do the job. The bag creased and filled with dirt is ready to find its home along the sidewalk, maybe the drive way, there is also the chance it lands around a tree. It has been my grandpas job for as long as I remember to place the stick between each bag to make sure it fits.

I don't call my grandpa, abuelito or my grandma, abuelita. I call them grandpa and grandma. What a thought to have so close to Christmas. Regardless they are a lot like my parents. I don't call faralitos, faralitos. I call them luminarias, but they both mean the same thing to my Christmas tradition.

The Navidad, reminds chicanos of the luminaria. Not the ethnic Chicano but the cultural Chicano.  Not the brown skinned Chicano but the kind hearted.  The humble symbolic lantern of light in a dark night. Isn't our life a beacon of hope for one another. Isn't it true that we are lanterns and disorient-able at the same time. I have a small burning candle in my heart. Its sheltered in my core. I am the brown paper bag. It's nestled in a bed of dirt. It lights the idea of home.

I trust the dim little amber yellow glow will be enough to guide my thoughts home. Home has become a journey, the journey. Not so much a place. The destination is no longer the priority because home is a condition more than it is a location. Not a destination that can be marked on a map, but experiences that splash the memories of those who share this life. Experiences, dusting the cosmos like a thin white jet stream left by a plane. A jet that once had a destination but now understands that its duty is to simply keep flying.

No, not like a jet stream. A little less straight, maybe more like the wake from a catamaran on a turquiose sheet of water. A catamaran leaving a carefree and curving essence of existence, gradually extending diagonaly left and right until both vectors seems to disappear. They never disappear though, it dissipates. Unless it finds an object to cause a rebound.

No, not like the wake from catamaran. A little less luxurious, maybe more like the tracks from a lonely snowshoer. A pair of snowshoes breaking through a white sparkly brilliance. Two shoes belonging to one person, crunching along, leaving a rhythm of evidence and disruption for as long as the temperature will allow. An essence that is completely dependent on the weather. My flame leaves experiences like snowshoes from a snowshoer with a pulsing flicker.

But not really like a snowshoer's tracks. Not as cold and surely an existence not so lonely. Maybe, an existence like a poem, always holding at the core the genetic and karmic nature of its author. Sometimes expressing the hurts, joys, and indifferences that reacted with other poets ideas about existing. And maybe like the hustle, shuffle, and buzz of a coffee house that lures poets. A congregation of poets, some who call themselves poets, others who are by mere intrinsic creativity considered poets. A collection of experiences like poets writing in a coffee house, my flame dances with energy.

The flame that I see in my heart is as determined as a jet stream streaking furiously through an empty atmosphere. The flame is as nonchalant as a catamaran in Caribbean sea. The flame fighting to glow can be as unaccompanied as pair of snowshoer's tracks. But usually the flame in my heart is as caring and warm as a coffee house filled with poets churning out ideas. My flame throws light against the shelter walls, animating with every flicker.

My flame flickers on this journey, the attitudes of others rustle my flame, not necessarily trying to put it out, creating conditions that bend, taunt, and tire my teardrop shape of fire. The journey is home, staying my course is my hope, and letting my little light shine is my duty. This little flame needs a cover. A cover that will let just enough light out but protect it from the gusts of discouragement.

Like the brown lunch bag that protects the luminaria's' flame from winds and the dirt nestling the candle's base, my body shields my little flame from fears, sustaining my dreams. The years get more and more trying. It feels like the lonely, cold, dark nights grow incrementally longer, perfectly challenging this weak but untiring flame of mine. Still, tonight, and even today that flame flickers giving life to the rhythms in my soul.



Dance little flame, because there is plenty of wick left.

A Letter to Dr. Coates

Mr. Ta-Nehisi Coates,
I find polarity towards what you have to say.  I woke up discouraged by the criticism being sent your way.  I just started tweeting, and you were the first person I looked to follow.  And then found that you shut your's down.  I wanted to throw out into the inter-verse how important it is that you antagonize the strugglers.  I ask you to keep asking our veteranos , uncles, and elders to be more clear and productive with how they'd like us to be clearer.

Dr. West's reasoning makes little sense because it seems like what he is asking of your messages is a perfectly complete discernment for all racial injustice.  His idea that your passion for demystifying White Supremacy is fetishism, is rude.  Would he describe Dr. Kings focus on civil rights as a fetish.  Would he minimize Cesar Chavez's commitment to labor laws a fetish.  This response lacks love, encouragement, and a growth mindset.  Dr. West's response is more like toxic endearment.  It is abusive to care so deeply that you want for the other something so unreachable.  The moving target of social justice will grab the perfectionist by the hair and drag them into their imperfections.  It is toxic endearment to galvanize my understanding of shared pain by inflicting a painful denial of your understanding.

I am learning that your effort to heal your pain is an insightful and inspiring to the ways I can also address my cultural pain.  The abusive kind of endearment that leads to any effort rarely being enough is a tool of White Supremacy.  And sadly we are reminded by two Black leaders how it doesn't take skin color to invoke this oppressive and tarnishing tool.  Arguing over who knows a more accurate suffering, who has authority to define the truest implications, and what constitutes a bona fide advocate is exactly what we don't need.  This arguing is the tradition that sustains White Supremacy.  I need you!

I need to know that the complex social pain within my Chicano life is not an isolated incident.  I need to have tools and strategies for improving my sensor for how my New Mexican communities' cultures are being disenfranchised, overlooked, and exploited.  You give my thoughts this improvement, by the thoughts you share and the implications you creatively explore.  The work you put into following today's pain into history's illusions have given me the courage to do that same for my Albuquerque peoples.  I ask with the upmost respect for you to remove your defenses, delete the doubt, but please put back your voice.

Dr. West might have the expertise and aptitude to assess the competency of race matters, but what he doesn't have the authority to do is to complicate you from reaching me.  He cannot define how your experiences help me resonate with my similar wounding.  The racially disenfranchised can't afford a delay in unraveling this pain.  The healing, I believe, will create this wholesome, accurate, and bona fide definition of thorough "freedom struggle".  I don't know if you left the twitter platform for larger reasons than this fiasco, but If your reasons are due to this fiasco, please return.

As Tupac Shakur sings it best, "you are appreciated"!

What shade of Race Are we - Part II

How do you see?

Part I

Race is of a toxic mindset.  It deceptively allowed Europeans a way to divide indivisible features of peoples because of an oligarchical or aristocratic desire to be less similar, more superior.  The European divider then manifested their competitive advantage.  Race is really a competitive deception.  Highlighting the falseness of an idea that an organism can be inferior.  What a sad perception, more of a reflection of a dualistic and toxic spirit's inflexion on other living beings.  We are asked to see it as a food chain, where it is more like a food system, possibly more like who feeds who versus who kills who.

A spirit cultivating a mindset that cannot value harmony, symbiosis, and quantum entanglement in favor being seen as "better", can't be the accepted mindset.  Spiritually, there is too much judgment in the idea "better".  I like to think of this need to have higher status as a defense mechanism, a form of fear.  To say I am better than something else is highlighting my limited perspective on how the "we" is the superior to the "me".  The competitive advantage in biology, adopted by psychology, and now running rampant in business and technology, has encroached on our opportunity for soul-cial democracy.

Money is a motivating antagonist for division, creating reactive mindsets and continuing a Race paced competitive mentality.  The competition seems to be a race for a finish-line that does not exist.  An expression of wealth that seems to grow infinitely.  It seems like the competition is a way for some to ignore how fragile life is.  It seems like the competition is to have a life's meaning that is pleasureful and sorrow-less.  Our first world human culture has graduated from discovering what is necessary to survive, to how can life be easier.  For many it also morphed into a necessity for discovering how a person can stand out.  The competitive, dualistic, Race based, and insatiable mindset has favored a disguised cooperating mindset, with a corporate one.

We have reached a new form of competitive advantage.  An Anglo-American disadvantage, less about race and more about profits. The privileged class in America is now having to deal with the marginalization of the Anglo-American.  This non race based marginalization may have always existed, but today it is becoming more difficult to believe the Anglo-American is superior, by default.  Now the Anglo-American no longer has an ideology to lean on.  No other people to dogmatically feel  superior to.

This seems to be causing the Anglo-American to grow bitter towards the supports put in place to limit the barriers to opportunity for discriminated peoples.  The marginalized Anglo-American wants to blame this intervention in the form of civil rights for their new found shrinking advantage.  It seems more accurate to look at the oligarchy, follow the money, and be curious of its economic strategies.  Some of us refuse to investigate the underlying reasons for marginalization.  It is sad that some Anglo-Americans wish to re-disable the discriminated as a way to address their shrinking advantage.

I want these marginalized Anglo-Americans to confront the greedy policies of their representatives and business leaders.  Hold them responsible for making room in learning institutions and be creative with vocations so that there are no shrinking advantaged communities.  There seems to be a lack of consideration for the historic effort put into protecting minorities over the past century.  It gets irritating when marginalized Anglo-American communities find themselves being abandoned by shrinking economies and corporate betrayal, then look to destroy these civil protections, especially of discriminated minorities, as a solution to their woes.  It is a reminder of how their loyalty is exploited by profiteers.  How do you see?

Part III

What shade of Race Are We - Part I

Race was conceived by colonial cultures to elevate their national distinction.  These colonial cultures needed a justification to objectify other humans and distort their existence.  Colonials defined these peoples as less than, mechanisms, to fuel their industries.  These colonial cultures manifested a convenient economic distinguish-er creating a mindset that allowed them to see their body as superior.  This implied inferiority wasn't fake, but surely wasn't necessarily biological or physiologic.  The enlightenment gave evidence that the European level of sophistication separated them from indigenous peoples.  Colonial's inhuman ideas of superiority seemed to depreciate their progressive cultural uniqueness.  It brings some sadness for how the concept of Race obfuscates the capacity for wonderment and gentleness in the Anglo culture. This need for Colonial or Anglo distinction has grown to be an American blemish still trying to make itself a home. The concept has become a barrier to human unity.

As much as I refuse to acknowledge the existence of Race, I have to own that I have integrated some of its toxic attributes into my own values.  It has lured me into seeing through the lens of racism.  I have to share how I size up Chicanos with the same racist lens Suburbia sees me through. I have to realize that I am the token brown friend at times, sometimes seen through my own insecurity and others times through my interpretation of clues.  I have to see how there are times when I try but can't camouflage my brownness with enough knowledge and wisdom to overcome someone's biased idea that my aptitude and capabilities can't be true.  I see how I do the same bigotry.  How do I dismantle these characteristics in my psyche?

I am challenged, distressed, and flabbergasted by recent racial topics in main stream publications, social interests, and politics.  Where is the understanding about Race's fictitious origins.  Can't we see the fiction? Can't we teach that Race is an idea not a principle?  I become anxious to watch how Race is distorting and distracting large populations from real social progress.  I get torn when I get inspired with a need to express my feelings and grievances, and do it without generalizing, implicating all Anglos , clumping together a spectrum of cultures Irish, Italian, Germanic, Greek, Briton, and various Eastern block cultures unfairly, their unique humanity cultural struggle ignored, their effort to express humanisticly, their contribution to undoing the stigmas and tension forgotten.  How do I speak to the ongoing struggle while honoring the Anglo cultures that don't explicitly contribute to the divisions of Race?

The challenge for me is trying to hold the understanding for how Race is entangled with profiling, vocation, religion and perception.

Part II

Not Racist...rather an Ethnicist

It seems surprising that we still use Race as a categorical demographic despite the word having no truth, being fabricated, and its toxicity.  And this is not to suggest that Racism is equally fake.  It saddens me to accept that Racism is a diagnosis for a form of hatred.  Racism, is articulated elegantly by Rev. William J. Barber as, "a strategic hate that has an agenda" (Barber, W.J (2017). Public Speech at Poor Peoples Campaign, August 15, 2017) .  We all are capable of hate.  And racism is a schism between those needing to tighten down a decorated shroud of hateful fallacies that promoted their industrial economic agenda and a reality that we are an integration of evolved bio mechanisms that are uniquely identifiable through genetics, yet our foundation, anatomy, and physiology functions indistinguishably, all worthy of wellness.  It's unfortunate that we camouflage the ethnic hatred with this schism by validating a fictitious word, Race.

I want Racism to be identified by its real source, Ethnic Hate.  We validate the meaning of Race by perpetuating its usage. We still use the concept to describe and acknowledge the ignorance of people still stubborn enough to believe we are differentiated by the illusion of Race.  It seems ignorant to spend time on this schism rooted in the word "Race" when we have the real ethnic, cultural, bigoted, prejudice, economic, social, and ideological schisms stressing this adolescent American nation.   The use of Race as the root word for the concept of racism, shields the propagation of underlying malice, going undetected in our social systems because Race itself is undetectable.  There are not any indicators for someone who is racist because there are not any indicators for Race.  There are indicators for someone who is phobic, prejudice, or discriminant because their statements and policies make it indicative.

The real concept under attack from imperial ideologies is ethnicity and culture.  Ethnicity aligns more with the real human distinguishers. My study of race, my encounter with my "racism", and the unfolding of the intelligence on the subject has allowed me to differentiate between the fiction, ideology, rationality, economics, bigotry, xenophobia and atrocity.  I can also be sad for how it has continued to be used for 600 years (Smedley,  A., 1997).  I hope to share more perspective on the covert and micro absurdities of Race, the concept, still lurking and giving traction to our unfair and unbalanced social constructs.  Race might be cultural sect-ism, inspired by prosperity, more likely rapacity, and corroded by hate, but it is still illusionary.

It would help shift the narrative around our human nature, to call racism what it really is... Ethnicism.

eth ·nic ·ism

/eTH 'ni' sizem /
noun

1. prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different ethnicity based on the belief that one's own ethnicity is superior.
2. the belief that all members of each ethinicity possess characteristics or abilities specific to that ethnicity, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another ethnicity or ethnicities.
3. a form of neurotic hatred treatable with love, cultural immersion, and humility.

References:

Smedley,  A., (1997). Origin Of The Idea Of Race. Public Broadcasting Service. http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-09.htm

Father's Day Crudo

The work I need to accomplish in order to show up in society, doing what I've been placed here to do, should be shared.  It gets cliche for me to think I was born with a destiny.  I've been lazily able to embrace the whole God has a plan for me.  I've done the whole I'll leave it in God's hands routine.  But in order for the rubber to meet the road, I have to get up, get still, get the messages, read the signs, and make the choices.  I have to do the work.  What kind of work?

 I've heard it called men's work.  It seems more appropriate to call it boy's work because it takes effort while in the child's mind, transcending the security of a mother's comforting blanket.  In order to overcome the convenience of boyhood, I had to find a compassion in my psyche for the boy.  I had most often destroyed the boy within, bullied the boy inside, wore it down.  I've had to learn to love the boy in me.  Not just one but many different facades that expressed with a boy's energy.  The boy is an archetype, symbolizing the aspects of my psychology that have not yet been galvanized by the existential crises of living.  With each archetype encountered, I find myself having to do "men's work".  I have to say good bye to the way I nestle up to the mother.  As long as there is a feminine energy to roll up to, hunker down in, and rest by, I will need to taste the vicious pull of discomfort.  This is a part of men's work.

Father Richard Rhor, through his knowledge and literature, guided me through a rights of passage.  It was my first lesson in the humble journey a man likely will take, must take, to approach a True Self.  I was shown in ritual 5 promises.  The rights of passage was a gathering with other men, taking us into an experiential process for feeling these promises.  It was something challenging to explain.  The best or only hint at what it was like is to call it a stimulation of True-ness.  The gathering was a collection of events and rituals, like prayers performed.  Each was brutally real, deep, and rich.   Each promise was a promise of work.  Each promise, if it could be describe by a direction, pointed down.  I learned a way to be dignified and emotionally responsible.

I found out that I wasn't the only man that had a distorted idea for what it meant to be a "man".  I find myself revisiting, these principles when I encounter my anxiety.  The promises remind me that the journey is hard, my duty is to see it through, to do not for me but to benefit all, that I belong to something grater than myself, and with grace I will die.  So how do you hand this across to a boy, even the archetype of a boy.  That is the motivation for this piece.

I can't teach the boy in me to be a man.  I can't coach the boy in me to be man.  It feels like I can only nurse a suffering boy ravaged by the insecurity of the wild, through the pangs of survival, reaching a condition of matured.  I find myself digging through my understanding of being a man and acknowledge that being a "man" might be more about restoring the boyish aspects of myself.  As if joining the mother need with an internal father.  A father that isn't drunk.  A father that isn't abusive or brash.  A father that is present and initiated with these prestige promises.  A father that understands how to cry enough through the pain while still working.  A nurturing father that will guide me through the panic, because the internal father trusts the 5 promises serve the soul.

Men's work must start with a nurturing male to place an understanding for what a gentle father can look like.  The boy must be given a living example to initiate the internal father.  The external father must nurture the boy, leaving behind the nurturing father to replicate for all other boyish aspects needing to repair the gap a mother can't fill.