Will We Ever Learn

Sigh............Roseanne Barr, the shock comedienne who mildly resuscitated her moribund career with a revival of her once popular eponymous show has again suffered from the recurring foot-in-mouth disease that seems to have led to her earlier professional demise.  From her "parody" of the national anthem to her dysfunctional relationship with her ex-husband Tom Arnold, she seems to possess an uncanny ability to reverberate controversy at seemingly every turn.  Her latest premeditated stupidity on Twitter, a virtual dumping ground for 280 characters of vitriol followed by the tired apology of I'm sorry in a tweet, has left an indelible digital footprint that garnered a swift and fatal blow to her already toxic bandwidth on network television.

Conservatives will most certainly defend her repugnant comparison of Valerie Jarrett as resembling the progeny of the Muslim Brotherhood and a simian as a bad joke in poor taste conflated to silence the paucity of Hollywood actors that serve as an advocate for their Twitterer-in-Chief.  What will again be lost in the diatribe of cultural wars is a dissonance that allows this kind of rabidly racist banter to still have traction in the new millineum. Racism in pockets of America is so imbued in the fabric of our nation that we can't seem to recognize how it has permeated the policies, practices and perceptions of the people who sacrosanctly declare themselves exceptional because they are American and of European descent. On November 24th, 1859, Charles Darwin published "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races In the Struggle For Life."   This pseudo-scientific publication is credited with being the foundation for evolutionary biology. What it also birthed are horrific ideological permutations in the form of Social Darwinism and Eugenics and the hegemony of racial superiority-more specifically of the Anglo-Saxon breed commonly known as white supremacy.

This mutant ideation buttressed the savagery that accompanied chattel slavery; the de facto economic engine that ushered this former British colony into a global industrial power.  Everything from the biblical justification for slavery, black codes, eugenics, Jim Crow and the bastardly publication featured in this blog was spawned from the egregious belief that races of color were not just inferior, but genetically and innately subordinate- which by the way is the antithetical view promulgated by the Bible!  Porch monkey, baboon, ape, and other disparaging adjectives have been hurled at black folks probably since the first forced immigrants got here in Jamestown off of a Dutch ship. The implicit bias that still allows centuries-old ideologies to lie dormant in the hearts and minds of its supposedly informed citizens of this decade should not only be a tired trope, but an indictment to the myth that we have ever been a post-racial country.  Any redress of grievances by blacks of the tentacles of this social carcinogen in the form of policies, procedures, and practices of an organization are still summarily dismissed or spun into a hijacked narrative featuring the derisive moniker "playing the race card."

So let's just call a spade a spade.  What has made this country great is its ability for introspection.  The edicts of its sacred parchments and pledges declare liberty and justice for all and the inalienable rights of its citizens to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Yet we are still chronicling Fortune 500 companies having to shut down to have "inclusivity" training and police chiefs walking back the conduct of police officers caught on video engaging in extrajudicial conduct.  We have a sitting President who purposefully engendered an anachronistic tribalism and racist jingoism ( "Go back to Africa") that would have made ol' racist stalwarts like Birmingham, Alabama Sheriff Bull Connor grin from ear to ear.  The problem is that the past is STILL NOT PROLOGUE or PAST.  The question is, how much of that toxin are you willing to settle with today and in the future!