Help! There's a Puerto Rican Woman About to Enslave All White People!

Too much work that has to get done to post a more lengthy piece today. But I gotta keep the momentum going, so I'm posting but keeping it short. I know, you're worlds are now shattered. Somehow I think you'll gather the courage and the strength to pick up the pieces.

Somehow the progress we've made on issues related to race/ethnic-based discrimination has brought us to a point where privileged white men (and Ann Coulter & Michelle Malkin) can talk about racism and oppression of whites by persons of color without simply being dismissed as ridiculous and absurd. The airwaves are full of folks talking up the racist record of Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

Media Matters has put together this minute and a half compilation of clips from the past few days of not-so-critical folks (seems like a prequisite for being on TV) making such claims. The list of noted intellectuals, race activists, and scholars on this clip includes Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Glenn Beck, Tom Tancredo, Pat Buchanan, and Lou Dobbs. Not exactly the role call at a MENSA meeting, and I'm pretty sure that's not a coincidence.

In addition to the video, Media Matters has also put together this list of myths being put forth about Judge Sotomayor, her record, and her beliefs.

Kinda makes you question this whole progress thing when individuals are allowed public platforms to simplify racism by dredging up the tired and weak arguments about so-called reverse discrimination and reverse racism.

Racism, in terms of how it manifests in the present moment and its historical roots, is contextual to a particular country, culture, and/or group. Racism in the US is not simply about X group discriminating against Y group (or Y, Z, A, B, and C for that matter). Racism in the US is about a White supremicist model that created and still controls all public and private systems and structures in our culture. There are unearned privileges that come with being White (and male, heterosexual, married, etc.).

Indigenous folks and people of color are and have been systematically oppressed in intentional and public ways, as well as through insitutionalized and insidious means that are simply woven into the fabric of our culture and our lives and accepted as the way it is. Electing a multiracial President does not make this all go away in one moment.

While all this blabbering about a Puerto Rican woman raised in the projects in the South Bronx being a racist is going on, the prison population remains disproportionately Black and Brown, poverty and infant mortality rates remain skewed based on race and ethnicity, and minority children continue to drop out of school at rates much higher than their White peers.

Man, this oppression against the White man has to stop. Otherwise, before you know it, we may even have 2 Black US Senators. Of course, the way things look with Senator (for now) Burris, we're much more likely to end up with none.