#12 Football. Ratings are down and there isn’t one reason why. Trump talks about the players, which we all know is code to talk about the black players. On the face of that, one would think that the black community would rally and start watching as a defying measure to Trump. But Kaepernick being isolated and not picked up by any team is a factor in blacks not viewing. The manner which many players have been restricted smacks of slavery. Then there is the disconnect locally: The Niners aren’t good, AND they left their home and haven’t rebounded; the 8th largest city in San Diego lost its team to #2 largest city 100 miles north in Los Angeles, and nobody’s coming; the Raiders are sorry again, and are planning to move out of state; the St. Louis Rams went out of state back to LA, and lost not just a community but an entire state; Houston was underwater and had bigger problems than a football team. The Pats have drama, the Giants have drama, and other teams seem to be tanking on purpose. Of the nation’s largest 25 cities, only 4 have playoff teams. No one is invested. Player off the field violence toward women and the long term damaging effects on the body is turning off even more. It’s not like football is the most expensive sport to see live; basketball is 50% more costly. Maybe it’s because the football players are getting darker, and the basketball players are getting lighter….
Watching people turn their backs on US gladiators is like watching the crumbling of a republic.
#11 Non-voters. Though it’s your right to abstain from voting (i.e. religious reasons), you are the 44% that never made a choice in the 2016 Presidential election. Rightly or wrongly, you made a no-decision decision to assert that Clinton and Trump were the same; that your incumbents at the local, regional, state, and federal levels all deserved to remain in place, and any key issues: environmental, social, financial—could be left up to your peers. People haven’t called you out because each camp is hoping to lure your support in the future. Yet no one respects your tactics, but the status quo loves it.
#10 Human Resources. US Department of Labor Statistics show 73% of the human resource managers are women, and Visier Inc. reports that number to be 76%. With evidence about men wielding abusive power at work, the tiny little secret is that the institutional change that should have happened years ago to empower victims and to summarily punish the perpetrators has been largely overseen by women. Pundits and women advocacy critics argue that if women were in positions of authority, the levels of assault and discrimination and sexual harassment would automatically fall in profoundly drastic levels because women are more sensitive to these issues, and would protect their own.
Well, the feminization of the human resources departments across so far America has meant very little, and the lack of courage and inaction by women leaders in these companies to put a zero tolerance culture in action is shameful. The idea that women are coming forward after varying degrees of assault means: 1) These women have had to go through many channels at their place of employment to be listened to, most times to no avail 2) If the women did not go through HR, it is likely that they felt that the HR culture would have been of little help. In other words, HR was a compromised agent for the executive leadership, and the victims would not be able to trust it—or the women who led it, to support them. The worst part is that HR departments are the corporation’s compliance arm, and they have legal obligations to do the right thing. While everyone was championing the courage of the women across government, business, and entertainment organizations which spoke out and publicly reported their aggressors, I was also waiting to hear about institutional reforms being led or championed by women to protect a future generation of women. I am still waiting……
#9 Millennials. In March 1955, two black women are arrested for not giving up their seats to white passengers; and black leaders come to the bus company to talk about seating arrangements. Nothing happens. After the third arrest with Rosa Parks, the black community stages a one day strike that extends to thirteen months. Hundreds of people carpooled and walked, in the cold of the winter and the heat of the summer in the boycott. Over the course of the year, MLK’s house is bombed, E.D. Nixon’s house is bombed, and 80 bus boycott leaders are indicted under anti-conspiracy charges, including King, who must pay $500 or go to jail for over a year. But they hold their ground, and win. Within a week after the bus desegregation, a shot was fired into King’s front door, white men attacked a black girl exiting the bus, two buses were fired on by snipers, and a pregnant woman was shot in both legs. Real sacrifice and real courage from our youth.
In 2017, the public learned of abuses of Uber, the ride sharing/taxi company, ranging from unethical practices in using stolen corporate documents, to breaking local, state and federal laws, to diversity issues, to sexual harassment, to securities breaches. Many of the same drivers for Uber also drive for its competitor, Lyft. There was early social media talk of not riding Uber any longer, to protest the company and its discriminatory policies. In 2017, there was no need to carpool, or to take the bus, or a city sanctioned taxi, or to walk. Patrons didn’t need to change their lifestyles in any manner. All a consumer needed to do was to flick on one application vs another, to get the same driver to pick them up, and Uber would have been out of business in six months.
Millennials are perceived as being aloof, out of touch, or self-absorbed in a manner to which no other generation has been labeled. They are the poster children of inner city gentrification, cultural appropriation, the tech sector, and a general lack of institutional history.
In companies such as Facebook, 75% of employees are under the age of 27. One would think that the youth driven environment of these corporations would yield a much less bigoted and much more inclusive workplace. Instead it is the opposite; the tech world has been the least woke of industries, while utilizing the black and brown communities as consumer cash cows, the most segregated working cultures happen in high tech. How can a millennial dominated industry brag about being the most forward thinking environment while practicing systematic discrimination reminiscent of fifty years ago?
Simple. Millennials believe in the same things that their great grandparents did.
In a Washington Post 2015 survey, it was discovered that Millennials are 20% more likely to view blacks as less intelligent than whites over Baby Boomers. 62% of white millennials believe that Confederate statues don’t represent prejudice but instead our cultural history.
Jim Crow may have died, but not before he begat James, who traded his white robe and jeans and blue collar for a suit. James begat Jack, and he gave up the suit for blue jeans and a white collar.
#8 The Environment. States that have no environmental reason to keep growing, are. Arizona, and Nevada with their lack of water; Texas and Florida, with its ongoing flooding issues and loss of land to the gulf and the ocean due to climate change, are upping the ante on ecological chaos. When we thought in 2016, there was some agreed to terms about how the world would begin to move forward, when the US had an administration that believed that some things were worth preserving, there was some movement to protect a livable planet for our grandchildren. No more.
An embarrassingly painful pullout of an international climate accord, which left the US only in alignment with a South American dictator; the relaxation or elimination of regulations for oil exploration on Native American sacred lands, the Artic Circle, and off the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines; the retraction of federally protected parks, the gutting of the EPA with an anti-EPA director, and the coarse rhetoric once reserved for slash and burn pirates on the open seas, we find ourselves giving the middle finger to our air, our creeks, our communities.
#7 The Poor. Everything in Republican policy not aimed at minorities was targeted at the poor. Poverty is growing by the tens of thousands in cities and middle America, and we expected the Democrats would be more receptive and supportive, but they haven’t crafted solutions. The infrastructure plan was set aside for a corporate tax cut, and while the Dow grew 25% in a year, there is no plan to include those left out of the prosperity. The white poor, the forgotten men and women of a fly over America as we have been so reminded in these last 24 months, got absolutely nothing for their vote.
#6 The Media. You gave him $3 Billion of free campaign coverage; never made him answer the tough questions you asked of other members of his party, let alone the Democrats, you allowed yourself to be compared to illegitimate news sources such as FOX or Breitbart, never once exposing them to the public as less than factual, so now you all look the same. You were less prepared for a Trump presidency than the black barbershop crew on Grand Avenue in Oakland. Now you are ticked off that the President has no respect for you. Guess what; most everyone else doesn’t either. And you male, smug, patrician acting bastards seem to be the most depraved sexual abusers in America when the cameras are off.
And a side note: Twitter should be ashamed, but they’re in it for the money.
#5 The Republican Party. Five Thirty-Eight shows over the last dozen years, white Republicans (which is 86% of the party) believe too much money is spent on improving the conditions of blacks, believed three times more by them than white Democrats, and the view is growing. White republicans have many negative views about engagement and support of people of color, while they have little dissatisfaction with the rise of white nationalism. Going after China and engaging in Far East provocations, repealing opportunities and/or enforcing immigration restrictions against immigrants from non-European nations, assault on Latin American immigration and DACA, and the incessant zeal to demolish every action taken by the Obama administration, supporting the Alt Right, decimation of Native lands, targeting affirmative action while bringing in the least qualified white leadership to run the federal and state governments ever assembled, raising taxes in minority states, gutting funding to minority programs such as the HBCUs, and making anti American comparisons at people challenging systemic brutality, the Republican Party has been openly active, or quietly complicit with its leadership. After seeing a 25-year increase–from 7% to 14%–of the Republican Party’s base become minority, the numbers are showing that trend reversed in 2017, and now the Grand Old Party is going in the other direction, becoming whiter again.
#4 The Democratic Party. You have revealed yourselves to be more protecting of the old timers that you are of the fight for the people. You are cowards, you abandon due process and tell one of your real dissenters of the Trump administration to leave so that you can pretend that you have no sexual predators on your team—then you ask him to come back at 23:59:58 pm… America has been rooting for you, and all you had to do was drop the formula and present outspoken leadership, an action plan to reclaim Congress, a vision for what America should be doing—and all you do is trot out a doddering Nancy Pelosi. Even Orrin Hatch knew when to throw in the towel…
#3 Truth. When the President is can lie 95% of the time and still enjoy a majority of Party support even when they know he is lying, there is nothing one can say about that. America is about as honest now as it was in 1860, and you can take that whatever way you want.
#2 Race Relations. When the Washington Post polled us in 2014, blacks had ten times as many black friends as white friends. But white people had 91 times as many white friends as black friends. Even if we were going for race based friendship, white people on average should still only have about 51 times more white friends. But hello, America isn’t only just black and white. 75% of white people have entirely white social networks with NO MINORITY presence. California is 61% minority, New Mexico is 63% minority, and Hawaii is 77% minority. Even the Lone Star State of Texas is 56% minority…white people can’t find one colored friend? In 2017 NPR said it is getting worse for white people, while black and Hispanic people are becoming more inclusive. The greatest barometer of race relationships are friendships. On Facebook, sometimes I look up your friends. When topics arise that show your friend is making a complete ass of himself yet is too clueless to correct, I will look him up. I do two things: I look at their total number of friends, and then I look for black people in their friends list. Now, that isn’t scientific since pictures change (like mine), but it’s a start. I find that the people who stay the most insipid, stupid, irredeemable shit is directly related to the number of black friends they have; the fewer number of black friends a white person has, the greater the race related imbecilic comments. If you have 300 friends and you have 2 black friends, we’re done. We’re not talking to each other and we’re finding reasons not to know each other. It’s hard to represent a United front to the world with a division at home.
#1 The Black Church. No group’s leadership could be less representative of its community than the black church. Fifty years ago, leaders moved the congregations to being bold and challenging the inequities of American life. Now the church is concerned about individual self-fulfillment. Being a prosperity preacher at the expense of moral outrage is a daunting challenge that many seem to navigate well. They don’t even need to follow the lead of the Pope, leaders in Canada, Mexico, Germany or England talking about the lack of American religious stewardship. They don’t even need to take up education, or brutality, or sexual assault, or immigration. The most notable preachers have been alarmingly silent as the rise of homelessness hits its cities while the most significant movements to protect, support, or uplift the disadvantaged communities are secular. Part of this is due to the rise of black evangelical churches run by white leadership that has never engaged in civil rights; much of this is due to an institution preserved by leaders who have multipliers more resources than their congregations. Yes, there are signs of life; in Alabama and in Virginia, where the church community rallied blacks to the polls. But until the greedy, selfish and the sexual predatory leadership—I predict the ‘Me Too’ is coming to the black church in 2018—is flushed out, expect a silent church in this pivotal election year. The communities are sinking slowly into the abyss, and the black pastor is flying overhead in his private jet, begging for a meeting with the President to get a federal grant, while en route from promoting his recent book about black people forgiving the rise of the largest hate group in America, white nationalist organizations……The black church has gone full Cornell West, blaming secular black leaders for not going along with the formula, while never challenging the institutions systemically hindering its flock.
holowe 