None of this, however, should be news.  The “pursuit of happiness” that is a founding principle of this country necessarily implies a culture of self-absorption and inequality, where one’s key to his or her own “happiness” often comes at the expense of another’s.  And blacks, in particular, have long been, and continue to be, the expendable ones in this equation.  And the election of our first “black” president has done nothing to change that.

There is time yet to reverse this trend.  And it takes not the writing or oratory of  a great thinker or scholar to do so.  Rather, the solution has been in front of our noses since time immemorial and has been posited in various forms to the general public.  Joe Black, a pitcher for the legendary 1950′s Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, did just in a university talk that was documented by Roger Kahn in his book, The Boys of Summer:

During a recent Honors Day Program at Virginia Union, a black university in Richmond, Black spoke about the responsibilities as well as the rewards of black power: “Our efforts have to be more positive than shouting, ‘Sock it to him, Soul Brother,’ or, ‘We are victims of a racist society,’ or, ‘Honkey!’ I’m in favor of black history because it makes whites realize that American blacks have done more than make cotton king. Rut I’m opposed to all-black dorms, and to violence. If the black student wants to use a loaded gun to make a point, what can we expect of uneducated blacks? By now some of you may be saying I’m a Tom, a window-dressing Negro. But I learned two things early.  A minority cannot defeat a majority in physical combat and you’ve got to let some things roll off your back.  Because my name is Joe Black, whites called me ‘Old Black Joe.’  After a few years of scuffling, I still hadn’t silenced all of them and throwing all those punches had made me a weary young man.  Call me ‘Old Black Joe’ today and you agitate nobody except yourself.”

He makes one point to everyone. It is bigotry to exalt the so-called special language of the blacks. “What is our language?” he asked. ” ‘Foteen’ or ‘fourteen.’ ‘Pohleeze’ for ‘police.’ ‘Raht back’ for ‘right hack.’ ‘We is going.’ To me any man, white or black, who says whites must learn our language is insulting.  What he’s saying is that every other ethnic group can migrate to America and master English, but we, who were born here and whose families have all lived here for more than a century, don’t have the ability to speak proper English.  Wear a dashiki or an African hairdo, but in the name of common sense, learn the English language. It is your own.”

At lunch, [Joe] handed me a sheet of paper.  ”This is part of my philosophy,” he said.  ”And by the way, notice the use of English vocabulary.”

I read:

blackball,

black hook,

black eye,

black friday,

black hand,

black heart,

blackjack,

black magic.

blackmail,

black market,

black maria,

black mark,

little black sambo,

white lies.

Black is Beutiful.

“If that’s what you make it, Joe,” I said.

“Well,” he said.  ”You got the point.”

WordPress.com has provided me with a year end report for 2011, which I have posted below for everyone’s reference.

Thank you all again for taking time out to visit the Invisible Man.  I look forward to another year of blogging on Padilla and other issues.

********

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,400 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Photo Courtesy of the Asia Society. From the Asia Society website: A Japanese American posted this banner on his store front the day after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and shortly before he was sent to an internment camp. Image: Dorthea Lange, National Archives.

Please allow me the opportunity to opine on something non-Padilla related.

Georgia, my state of residence, is on the cusp of enacting legislation that would provide broad and unprecedented authority to law enforcement to question, stop and arrest residents who are suspected of being in this country illegally.  That such a measure has come to fruition should come as no surprise to most.  Hostility toward one or another unfavored class of individuals is a time-honored American tradition, especially among power-hungry politicians and shallow-thinking citizen-reactionaries.  Nor is Georgia the first state to come this close to providing the constable such unbridled authority to detain and harass.  Arizona has already gone down the same path, but with little to show for it besides rhetoric and litigation.  There is little doubt that Georgia won’t also go the way of Arizona on this soon-to-be enacted immigration measure.  It will.

But the concerns  about racial profiling and states’ rights that invariably arise when debate occurs as to the wisdom of these sweeping new laws are, it seems to me, misplaced.  Racial discrimination is as intractable a societal malaise as poverty and crime.  This is true regardless of whether the society is founded upon the principles of capitalism and democracy, as ours assertedly is, or, like modern-day Russia and China, quasi-communism and authoritarianism.  Arguing against these laws then by claiming, even reasonably, that they are discriminatory is akin to arguing against compelled homelessness because such a condition is unjust and unfair.  Most reasonable minds won’t differ on that, but some will, and if these are the same folks who control the institutions of our government, then good luck to you.

Discussion should instead focus on how the recent anti-immigrant legislation affects the viability of this country’s self-described role as the “Leader of the Free World” and its foundation as an open, democratic society.  If, according to the latest U.S. Census findings, it is true that whites will soon constitute a statistical minority in this country, displaced by Hispanics and Asians, then any official effort to discriminate and expel members of this soon-to-be majority smacks of apartheid.  If that is indeed the case, then Americans need to have a sustained, serious and open discussion as to the direction of this country and the relationship, in all senses of the word, that should prevail between a white minority and non-white majority.  I can think of at least one other country that is currently engaged in such a debate: Israel.  Only when these fundamental issues are aired in public and their implications seriously debated (I make no predictions as to which side will prevail in such a debate) can this country move beyond the current wave of reactionary, anti-immigrant sentiment.

[Orwell begins by recounting a conversation that he had overheard between two relatively well-off Scots in which they attribute a number of Scotland's problems to the influx of the Poles. Among other things, the Poles are blamed for unemployment; the housing shortage, declining morals, etc. Orwell then proceeds to offer the following thoughts on this discussion:]

One cannot, of course, do very much about this kind of thing. It is the contemporary equivalent of anti-semitism. By 1947, people of the kind I am describing would have caught up with the fact that anti-semitism is discreditable, and so the scapegoat is sought elsewhere. But the race hatred and mass delusions which are part of the pattern of our time might be somewhat less bad in their effects if they were not reinforced by ignorance. If in the years before the war, for instance, the facts about the persecution of Jews in Germany had been better known, the subjective popular feeling against Jews would probably not have been less, but the actual treatment of Jewish refugees might have been better. The refusal to allow refugees in significant numbers into this country would have been branded as disgraceful. The average man would still have felt a grudge against the refugees, but in practice more lives would have been saved.

So also with the Poles. The thing that most depressed me in the above-mentioned conversation was the recurrent phrase, “let them go back to their own country.” If I had said to the two business-men, “Most of these people have no country to go back to,” they would have gaped. Not one of the relevant facts would have been known to them. They would never had heard of the various things that have happened to Poland since 1939, any more than they would have known that the over-population of Britain is a fallacy or that local unemployment can co-exist with a general shortage of labor. I think it is a mistake to give such people the excuse of ignorance. You can’t actually change their feelings, but you can make them understand what they are saying when they demand that homeless refugees shall be driven from our shores, and the knowledge may make them a little less actively malignant.

[UPDATE: I neglected to identify the source of this passage by Orwell; it formed a part of Orwell's regular column in Tribune, a left-leaning British periodical, and which carried the common title, "As I Please."  This was from As I Please 70, January 24, 1947]

*****

Harlem circa 1987(?)

The projects in Harlem are hated.  They are hated almost as much as policemen, and this is saying a great deal.  And they are hated for the same reason: both reveal, unbearably, the real attitude of the white world, no matter how many liberal speeches are made, no matter how many lofty editorials are written, no matter how many civil-rights commissions are set up.

The projects are hideous, of course, there being a law, apparently respected throughout the world, that popular housing shall be as cheerless as a prison.  They are lumped all over Harlem, colorless, bleak, high, and revolting.  The wide windows look out on Harlem’s invincible and indescribable squalor: the Park Avenue railroad tracks, around which, about forty year ago, the present dark community began; the unrehabilitated houses, bowed down, it would seem, under the great weight of frustration and bitterness they contain the dark, the ominous schoolhouses from which the child may emerge maimed, blinded, hooked, or enraged for life; and the churches, churches, blocks upon block of churches, niched in the walls like cannon in the walls of a fortress.  Even if the administration of the projects were not so insanely humiliating (for example: one must report raises in salary to the management, which will then eat up the profit by raising one’s rent; the management has the right to know who is staying in your apartment; the management can ask you to leave, at their discretion), the projects could still be hated because they are an insult to the meanest intelligence.

Harlem got its first private project, Riverton — which is now, naturally, a slum — about twelve years ago because at that time Negroes were not allowed to live in Stuyvesant Town.  Harlem watched Riverton go up, therefore, in the more violent bitterness of spirit, and hated it long before the builders arrived.  They began hating it at about the time people began moving out of their condemned houses to make room for this additional proof of how thoroughly the white world despised them.  And they had scarcely moved in, naturally, before they began smashing windows, defacing walls, urinating in the elevators, and fornicating in the playgrounds.  Liberals, both white and black, were appalled at the spectacle.  I was appalled by the liberal innocence — or cynicism, which comes out in practice as much the same thing.  Other people were delighted to be able to point to proof positive that nothing could be done to better the lot of the colored people.  They were, and are, right in one respect: that nothing can be done as long as they are treated like colored people.  The people in Harlem know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere else.  No amount of “improvement” can sweeten this fact.  Whatever money is now being earmarked to improve this, or any other ghetto, might as well be burnt.  A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.

Similarly, the only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive.  None of Commissioner Kennedy’s policemen, even with the best will in the world, have any way of understanding the lives led by the people they swagger about in two’s and three’s controlling.  Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gumdrops to children.  They represent the force of the white world, and that world’s real intentions are, simply, for that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corraled up here, in his place.  The badge, the gun in the holster, and the swinging club make vivid what will happen should his rebellion become overt.  Rare, indeed, is the Harlem citizen, from the most circumspect church member to the most shiftless adolescent, who does not have a long tale to tell of police incompetence, injustice, or brutality.  I myself have witnessed and endured it more than once.  The businessmen and racketeers also have a story.  And so do the prostitutes.  (And this is not, perhaps, the place to discuss Harlem’s very complex attitude towards black policemen, nor the reasons, according to Harlem, that they are nearly all downtown.)

It is hard, on the other hand, to blame the policeman, blank, goodnatured, thoughtless, and insuperably innocent, for being such a perfect representative of the people he serves.  He, too, believes in good intentions and is astounded and offended when they are not taken for the deed.  He has never, himself, done anything for which to be hated — which of us has? — and yet he is facing, daily and nightly, people who would gladly see him dead, and he knows it.  There is no way for him not to know it: there are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.  He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country which is precisely what, and where, he is, and is the reason he walks in two’s and three’s.  And he is not the only one who knows why he is always in company: the people who are watching him know why, too.  Any street meeting,  sacred or secular, which he and his colleagues uneasily cover has as its explicit or implicit burden the cruelty and injustice of the white domination.  And these days, of course, in terms increasingly vivid and jubilant, it speaks of the end of that domination.  The white policeman, standing on a Harlem street corner, finds himself at the very center of the revolution now occurring in the world.  He is not prepared for it — naturally, nobody is — and, what is possibly much more to the point, he is exposed, as few white people are, to the anguish of the black people around him.  Even if he is gifted with the merest mustard grain of imagination, something must seep in.  He cannot avoid observing that some of the children, in spite of their color, remind him of children he has known and loved, perhaps even of his own children.  He knows that he certainly does not want his children living this way.  He can retreat from his uneasiness in only one direction: into a callousness which very shortly becomes second nature.  He becomes more callous, the population becomes more hostile, the situation grows more tense, and the police force is increased.  One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.  Before the dust settled or the blood congealed, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened.  What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men.

Negroes want to be treated like men: a perfectly straightforward statement, containing only seven words.  People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable.  The idea seems to threaten profound, barely conscious assumptions.  A kind of panic paralyzes their features, as though they found themselves trapped on the edge of a steep place.  I once tried to describe to a very well-known American intellectual the conditions among Negroes in the South.  My recital disturbed him and made him indignant; and he asked me in perfect innocence, “Why don’t all the Negroes in the South move North?”  I tried to explain what has happened, unfailingly, whenever a significant body of Negroes move North.  They do not escape jim-crow: they merely encounter another, not-less-deadly variety.  They do not move to Chicago, they move to the South Side; they do not move to New York, they move to Harlem.  The pressure within the ghetto causes the ghetto walls to expand, and this expansion is always violent.  White people hold the line as long as they can, and in as many ways as they can, from verbal intimidation to physical violence.  But inevitably the border which has divided the ghetto from the rest of the world falls into the hands of the ghetto.  The white people fall back bitterly before the black horde; the landlords make a tidy profit by raising the rent, chopping up the rooms, and all but dispensing with the upkeep; and what has once been a neighborhood turns into a “turf.”  This is precisely what happened when the Puerto Ricans arrived in their thousands — and the bitterness thus caused is, as I write, being fought out all up and down those streets.

Northerners indulge in an extremely dangerous luxury.  They seem to feel that because they fought on the right side during the Civil Way, and won that they have earned the right to merely deplore what is going on in the South, without taking any responsibility for it; and that they can ignore what is happening in Northern cities because what is happening in Little Rock or Birmingham is worse.  Well, in the first place, it is not possible for anyone who has not endured both to know which is “worse.”  I know Negroes who prefer the South and white Southerners, because “At least there, you haven’t got to play any guessing games!”  The guessing games referred to have driven more than one Negro into the narcotics ward, the madhouse, or the river.  I know another Negro, a man very dear to me, who says, with conviction and with truth, “The spirit of the South is the spirit of America.”  He was born in the North and did his military training in the South.  He did not, as far as I can gather, find the South “worse”; he found it, if anything, all too familiar.  In the second place, though, even if Birmingham is worse, no doubt Johannesburg, South Africa, beats it by several miles, and Buchenwald was one of the worst things that ever happened in the entire history of the world.  The world has never lacked for horrifying examples; but I do not believe that these examples are meant to be used as justification for our own crimes.  This perpetual justification empties the heart of all human feeling.  The emptier our hearts become, the greater will be our crimes.  Thirdly, the South is not merely an embarrassingly backward region, but a part of this country, and what happens there concerns every one of us.

As far as the color problem is concerned, there is but one great difference between the Southern white and the Northerner; the Southerner remembers, historically, and in his own psyche, a kind of Eden in which he loved black people and they loved him.  Historically, the flaming sword laid across this Eden is the Civil War.  Personally, it is the Southerner’s sexual coming of age, when, without any warning, unbreakable taboos are set up between himself and his past.  Everything, thereafter, is permitted him expect the love he remembers and has never ceased to need.  The resulting, indescribable torment affects every Southern mind and is the basis of the Southern hysteria.

None of this is true for the Northerner.  Negroes represent nothing to him personally, except, perhaps, the dangers of carnality.  He never sees Negroes.  Southerners see them all the time.  Northerners never think about them whereas Southerners are never really thinking of anything else.  Negroes are, therefore, ignored in the North and are under surveillance in the South, and suffer hideously in both places.  Neither the Southerner nor the Northerner is able to look on the Negro simply as a man.  It seems to be indispensable to the national self-esteem that the Negro be considered either as a kind of ward (in which case we are told how many Negroes, comparatively, bought Cadillacs last year and how few, comparatively, were lynched), or as a victim (in which case we are promised that he will never vote in our assemblies or go to school with our kids).  They are two sides of the same coin and the South will not change — cannot change — until the North changes.  The country will not change until it reexamines itself and discover what it really means by freedom.  In the meantime, generations keep being born, bitterness is increased by incompetence, pride, and folly, and the world shrinks around us.

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the fact of one’s victim, one sees oneself.  Walk through the streets of Harlem and see what we, this nation, have become.

*****

I would simply add that even though Baldwin wrote this piece in 1960, much remains the same with respect to the treatment of the “black man.”  In fact, one might say that things are worse, what with the country’s first black president presiding over the populace and his willful declaration of a post-racial America, as fixtures of urban and now suburban America in ghettos and racially segregated enclaves continue to evolve in complexity and size.

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The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 5,100 times in 2010. That’s about 12 full 747s.   In 2010, there were 25 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 63 posts. There were 17 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 2mb. That’s about a picture per month. The busiest day of the year was August 30th with 265 views. The most popular post that day was UPDATE: Chaidez and Padilla Retroactivity.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were bibdaily.com, albertwanlaw.com, en.wordpress.com, blawgsearch.justia.com, and mail.yahoo.com. Some visitors came searching, mostly for chiman rai, padilla v. kentucky retroactive, padilla retroactivity, cleveland clark, and padilla retroactive.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

UPDATE: Chaidez and Padilla Retroactivity August 2010 1 comment

Justice Stevens’ Last Hurrah (Maybe) April 2010 6 comments

Padilla Retroactivity Update August 2010

Is Padilla Simply a New Name for an Old Rule? July 2010 1 comment

“Positive Peace” – Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail January 2010 1 comment

Photo courtesy of Pulsemedia.org

Tony Judt, the historian, intellectual and teacher, died on Friday.  Mr. Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease, in September 2008 but continued to teach, write and lecture up until the time of his death.  Mr. Judt considered himself lucky that much of his work required not the use of his hands, as is the case with many other who have been afflicted with the disease, but his mind, which was left relatively untouched by the ravages of ALS.  Although I have never met Mr. Judt (we exchanged emails once), he often comes to mind as one of few  intellectuals today who most closely embodies that traits of another intellectual giant of our times, George Orwell.  Courageous, honest and introspective, Mr. Judt belongs to the rare breed of intellectual who is not only competent and intelligent enough to reconstruct and examine the foundation of our society in all its flaws and imperfections but  is also bold enough to publicly confront those defects head on without pretension or self-aggrandizement.  Mr. Judt was 62.

There are many things to say about “The Boys of Summer.”  But I will limit myself to the following observations:

1955 Brooklyn Dodgers after winning the World Series (L. to R. D. Snider, C. Labine, G. Hodges, and R. Campanella)

(1) By and large, the players whom Khan profiled led productive lives after baseball.  These lives were by no means glamorous.  One player tended bars (Billy Cox), another installed elevators in what used to be the World Trade Center (Carl Furillo).  But they were nevertheless purposeful lives that transcended professional baseball and its trappings of fame and glory.

(2) Money was just as important for baseball front office officials back in the 1950′s as it is in today’s game where players are given multi-million dollar contracts and  blustery high-priced agents put  on smoke-and-mirrors shows.  The amount of money involved in today’s game is of course multitudes greater than the paltry sums that were, for instance, paid to Duke Snider, then considered the league’s premier slugger.  And this rings true even when one accounts for every possible economic variable out there (inflation, cost-of-living, etc).

This raises an interesting question of whether players today envision leading productive lives after their playing careers are over.  I would venture to guess that they do not judging from the astronomical salaries that are demanded and ultimately paid.  But can one blame them?  Playing baseball day in and day out prepares one for little else besides, well, playing baseball.  And in today’s increasingly technical and skill-driven world, this does not bode well for the job-search prospects of the modern professional athlete.  Factor in the advent of free agency and the near certainty of permanent physical debilitation and one almost expects that today’s slugger or ace pitcher be paid up the wazoo.

Why then do we still hear people complain about overpriced ball players?  (A-Rod comes promptly to mind.)  Surely, this is a some reflection that there exists a disconnect between current salaries and what the average person thinks a professional ball player should be making.  This disconnect has in fact driven a number of folks from the game entirely.  Does this mean that a return to the “glory days” of baseball is in order?  A time when players were treated less like celebrities and more like Joe from around the corner or when the off-season was just as often spent working part-time as a grocery store clerk as it was spent conditioning one’s body for next season.  Is it reasonable to expect that players today not bank on their major league careers as the only time in their lives during which they will be productively employed in some shape or form?  And taking that one step further, would it be reasonable to expect that today’s player accept some kind of non-baseball related employment once their playing careers end?

These are questions that I pose to you, the reader, in hope of generating a discussion about this topic with baseball fans and non-baseball fans alike.

So yes, today is Memorial Day and yes, “thank you” might not be a universal sentiment among those who are aware of what Memorial Day stands for.  But remembrance, respect, and recognition are, I submit, indispensable ingredients of a proper Memorial Day tribute.

To the general public this result may seem like familiar examples of the criminal justice system run amok and criminal defense attorneys up to their usual tricks .  Even the judge, who accepted the plea but had almost no knowledge of how the police trampled on the client’s constitutional rights in their haste to rid society of another criminal element, was taken aback by the deal the client received from the prosecutor.  To hear the incident recounted during the plea proceedings, one would be hard pressed to think otherwise: guns and drug-like substances were recovered, client’s friend fleeing the scene, client slamming the door on the police and then attempting to flee himself.  But what was not disclosed and what really turned the case around was how the police violated god knows how many constitutional and statutory provisions against unreasonable searches and seizures when they searched the apartment client was at without a valid warrant, and the one they eventually did get was just as good as no warrant at all when they failed to comply with appropriate procedures.

The unfortunate thing is that the public will, for the most part, never learn of what the police did and, for that matter, didn’t do, in the client’s case.  The fortunate thing though is that the client had  attorneys who did find out what happened (not always a given) and raised hell with the prosecutor about it as was their duty under the Constitution.