Acting White: Aggravated Insult To Assault

Contrary to what some believe, I don’t see race in every issue. Sex, maybe, race, no. Race issues (like everything else) are often about sex, but I’ll save that for another post.

Back on topic - when a bullet came flying into my living space last week, fired by a young woman, there was no issue of race, except that she was not a young black male, the statistical odds-on favorite for such activity here in Oakland. The three responding police officers, Asian, White, and Latino, arrived, albeit delayed, and were professional all the way around, including the arrest of shooter. No race issue here. The OPD called the following day to say they wanted to send a technician by to look at the evidence, but this has yet to happen. It seems that the technicians are a pretty busy OP department. Still, no race issue.

Continuing on - one of my neighbors sent me an e-mail saying that the shooter had been charged with aggravated assault (negligent discharge of a firearm), which carries, even as a misdemeanor here in California, a minimum six-month jail sentence. So I’m thinking, wow, these people are serious – go Oakland. Fair is fair, still no issue.

So where’s the race issue, dude? Well, yesterday I got another call from the OPD, but this time they are saying that the D.A. is asking if I want to press charges against the shooter. What? Since when do I have to press charges to get people to do their jobs protecting the public? The caller said the D.A. would pursue at my request, and that I should bring the collected bullet fragments to court, once they got back to me with a date.

Now just for fun, I replayed the officer’s request to a friend (non-black) who lives in Oakland, and the first thing she said was, “I bet the D.A. wouldn’t be asking you that question if the shooter was black”. Yes world, we have a confirmed sighting of a race issue in Oakland. Let’s see, witnesses (5), bullet hole, smoking gun, spent bullet, but still a questionable prosecution, why? Two words – white female.

Now, it is only her fault that she is likely to go to jail – the law is the law and her actions risked GBI (great bodily injury). I’m betting that the D.A. would like to bend the charge to simple assault (minimum probation), but for that he needs to know that the victim, me, is not going to kick-up a shit storm. Don’t count on it. They don’t know how well I kick. For starters, I smell a class-action suit on behalf of all the black, Latino, and other non-white CPC 245’s prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to the full extent, while this D.A. is looking for a reason to let Snow White off with a wrist-slap. I’m not playing – this B.S. is not funny, and on this, as the owner of the bullet hole, I have some standing, whether certain people like it or not.

Stay tuned.

James C. Collier

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Acting White: Acting Stupid In Oakland

This post is evidence that stupidity does not care about race, gender, age, or anything else. It takes up residence wherever, and in whomever it likes. An adult-age young person was arrested this morning just outside my humble abode. For context, while I live in an urban setting, my building happens to be the part-time residence of California’s current attorney general, Oakland's former Mayor, and likely re-run governor, one Jerry Brown. So one might think they are safe here - they would be wrong!

Earlier this morning I was abruptly awakened by what sounded like a gunshot. I looked outside and saw nothing. I returned to spy damage in my wall of what appeared to be the result of a discharged weapon. Further searching along an assumed trajectory showed a bullet lodged in an opposing concrete surface. Damn, somebody (namely me) could have been killed!

Regardless of the statistics, the culprit was not a young black male, with sagging pants, but rather a fair-haired white female who was visiting my next-door neighbor, a British-accented fellow who happened to have, on premise, a registered and loaded handgun. Despite explicit warnings (I'm told), the woman retrieved the weapon, and, minus any permission, fired it through the wall into my apartment. Yep, that's right, through the wall over the sofa. After questioning her, the OPD charged her with negligent discharge of a firearm, and provided a free back-seated, hand-cuffed, ride to downtown Oakland. I can only assume that her comments to them did not give them pause to option her a "oops, my bad, I'm just a harmless white girl' citation and cut her lose. BTW, the charge (CPC 246.3 is a 'wobbler', misdeameanor or felony) and carries a max of one year in jail.

So for those who like to believe that only blacks are violent, reckless and stupid, or that this blogger believes this because I write about such things, here is one piece of home-grown data to chew on when it comes to the agnostic character of stupidity. Said trigger-happy, authentic 'white chick' did not get a pass from the OPD, nor did I have to display any race cards to get proper action. Today undoubtedly goes down as a good day for me, since I did not actually catch the lead projectile so carelessly, and violently, launched in my direction.

James C. Collier

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Senator Ted Kennedy: 1932 - 2009

“It's better to send in the Peace Corps than the Marine Corps.”
Ted Kennedy

James C. Collier

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Acting White: Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard

So what’s the big deal with Martha’s Vineyard (MV) anyway? Sure, the first family deserves a vacation, but going to the up-scale Massachusetts island seems to have more significance than, say, Disneyworld, or Yosemite. As a former Bay State resident and serial MV visitor, it took me a few years to figure out why all the hoopla over the 57th largest island in the US, but here goes.

Some people will tell you MV is about the late Jackie O, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Oprah Winfrey, Spike Lee, et al, but this is just the show-people side. The island is really about a nice place where mostly rich men and fewer rich women, white and black, have historically sent their spouses/scions in the late summer, while they (themselves) continue to toil away at making goo-gobs of money in places like New York, DC, Philadelphia, and Boston, until they scoot in the last week of August. This is not what makes the island special.

On closer inspection, MV ‘islanders’ have a similar, albeit more staid, ‘hang loose’, attitude to that which pervades the way-west, native Hawaiians and how they look at things, especially people. Mainlanders are people with hang-ups about status, race, money, sex, age, you name it. Islanders, on the other hand, just go with the flow (or pretend to), even if it’s just for that short time between their arriving and departing boat.

At Disneyworld, rude Americans or Europeans, will cut lines, yell at the help, or complain about how miserable someone or something is making them. True islanders, everybody’s dream, have a relaxed attitude that is unflappable. Of course, the pretenders (and they are everywhere) do just that, pretend to go with the flow, feeling small swatches of what it is like to do the full-time Rodney King shuffle, called ‘getting along’.

There are two-tiers of Vineyarders, the first level is easy and includes anyone thoughtful enough to repeatedly show up to enjoy the place, in the first place. The second tier is the far more select group, not including the stinking rich, with the emotional and financial commitment to buy a home, or hang onto one given them, that they will likely use only a few weeks/months out of the year. I respect these true islanders because they like what they like and they are not afraid to sacrifice the piggy-bank to get it.

Finally, it is easiest to spot the truest Vineyarders on MV by when and whether you see them at all, as they arrive and depart the Woods Hole, Oak Bluffs and Vineyard Haven ferry docks with SUV's loaded from Costco and on schedules nearly opposite our favorite Gulf-Stream driving celebrities, especially politicians.

James C. Collier

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Acting White: Obama, Calling Mr. Kotter

Interesting carrot the Obama team is dangling in front of school administrators and teachers across the country, a sort of a baseball bat made to look like a carrot, or vice-versa, depending on your perspective. And it’s not a small carrot at that, $4.3 billion dollars, to be exact. Only thing is that some folks are miffed because the president is trying to inject vitality into and education dynamic, long in need of over-haul.

Specifically, Obama is offering the funds, under his "Race To The Top" program, only to school systems that link teacher evaluations to the performance of their students. Huh? That socialist S.O.B! So if he wants to do this, I’m wondering what pay is tied to today? Turns out that teacher’s get evaluated based on longevity and their own schooling, not student results. So, if I’m a teacher today and I want a raise, I go to school at night and in the summers, and game the classroom to minimize its outside distraction (on me), unless I have true dedication and a sugar-daddy/momma taking up the bill-paying slack at home.

Some state legislatures are considering changing laws on the books, California being one, which make it illegal to link teacher evaluation and pay to student results. Wow! Illegal! Education - a profession where the law forbids your boss from considering how well you actually teach, when it comes to your pay. It’s no wonder that our schools are failing.

Now do I think that this fixes things? Not by a long shot. We are still stuck in a back-end quality control mindset, rather than one of front-end assurance. But this move sends a nice signal about where education priorities should reside - between the student brains and teacher wallets. Welcome Back Kotter.

James C. Collier

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Acting White: Blue Eyes vs. Black-Skin

I gained an interesting peek a short while ago into a facet of white people. This was not my expressed purpose in helping my friend, but the character of the situation caught my attention nonetheless. Too often, when differences of race or ethnicity appear, we subscribe some nefarious motive to the cause/result and spin-off into our respective worlds of verbal jousting. But more often than not differences are just an illustrative story of the less presented pathways to the present.

The place was an eye specialists’ office, specifically an ophthalmologist/surgeon, with a waiting room stacked full of patients, white patients, each with some form of eye lesion (tumor). Most of the tumors are nearly invisible and benign, but some, unfortunately, are malignant (cancerous) and must be treated, via surgery. Now this room of people was not just white, but of people, curiously, who’s location of ethnic origin (LEO) was Northern Europe and Scandinavia.

If we review eye color in humans, we might recall that mutations beyond classic brown-eyes could and did occur in all people, but only ‘stuck’ in people of higher latitudes and lower sun intensity because, bluntly put, blue/grey/hazel/green eyes did not facilitate their premature death. Fast forward to the doctor’s office and what we see, in part, is what happens when fair-skinned/eyed people move from northern latitudes southward to such places as the US, where their bodies, and in this case eyes, are not well-adapted to a different sun intensity. Wham! Nevus, nevi! Cancer!

So just as blacks in North America experience internal cancers rates that exceed the mean of their brethren in West Africa, and the white population, whites experience ‘external’, or surface-level, rates that exceed the mean of blacks as well as their folks in the old country, and for really the same reason; displacement from the latitudes to which our bodies are best adapted. Blacks were moved north (and to South America) during the Atlantic slave trade and fair whites immigrated west and southward looking for opportunity.

If we continue, we see that the cures for these higher cancer rates, other than returning to our respective ancestral homes, are quite simple. To begin, everybody needs a D3 blood serum level that is adequate. Most of us are deficient in this cheap vitamin supplement, available over-the-counter at any pharmacy/health store, that allows our immune system to root out wayward cells. Following on, everybody, young and old, needs to protect their eyes and skin from the sun. Hats, sunglasses, proper clothing, and sunscreen are needed anytime we are in the sun, not just in summer at high-noon.

It is natural for us to use our differences to exaggerate our group strengths and to attempt to hide perceived weakness, but if we look at ourselves honestly, we will always see that there is much more that makes us similar, even through the lens of our differences.

James C. Collier

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Acting White: Red-Hair vs. Black-Skin

African-Americans often present the Atlantic slave trade as the end-all-beat-all of human abuse in the last millennium, and this is the reason for the intractableness of black pathologies, violence, crime, etc. With only mixed results, some (including me) have tendered an alternate view of what besets the stolen peoples of the Americas and Africa. In this view, the pain and lasting effects of slavery are more relative to freedom opportunity and perspective lost, and less comparable to competing histories of who done who the more wrong (sic).

The article from the NYT last week (here) on the subject of red-haired people as genetically more resistant to pain-medication, and therefore subject to more pain than others, caught my attention, as a interesting illustration of apples-to-oranges comparisons. What matters is not the knee-jerk argument of who hurts the most among brunettes, blonde's, and red-heads, but rather that red-heads have comparably bad teeth because dentist under-anesthetize them, chasing them away, as a group, from essential dental care.

Many African-Americans make the case for special dispensation and compensation, because of how inhumane slavery in the Americas was to blacks, compared to some standard in history, rather than looking at the specific plight of blacks and saying, “what does this group need in order to prosper?” What blacks do not need is more pity, but this is what the often-heard mode of complaint suggests. There is nothing intractable about black pathologies, except the insidious re-application of so-called solutions, better designed to keep people down rather than help them up.

We are living an explosion of fatherless kids because the government rewards such behavior. Schools, as hideouts for bum-teachers and dead-ass parents, have been promoting kids for years who can barely read or add, only to now coach them directly to the tests. Trade jobs are gone to China, as Americans hunger like addicts for more and cheaper consumable goods, to numb themselves to the debt required to pay for them. Sorry folks, it ain’t about who’s slavery was worse, but rather from politicians on down, it is really about who is pitchin’ in to make things for themselves and others - better.

James C. Collier

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