"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Sunday, July 14, 2013

Dear Martin Family: I'm Sorry White People Are Such Idiots
Posted by Jill | 9:46 AM


I have two friends at work, "Sam" and "Cheri" (not their real names). Sam is in his forties, from an affluent black family in the south. Cheri is from the Caribbean. Both have white spouses and mixed-race children. Sam is often described as "having no boundaries." In this particular individual, that's a good thing, because you know with Sam you are always dealing with an honest broker. It also makes for a lot of no-holds-barred discussions about race.

We often joke around about it. Sam calls Cheri "Blackie" without impunity. They poke gentle fun at my inability to move my head like an angry black woman does. Sam will joke about how if I go to "the 'hood", people will get out of my way because a short middle-aged white woman walking around the hood must be batshit crazy. There's an honesty to this interaction, but I know it is only to a point. And frankly, I wonder how they will bear to look at me -- or anyone else of my race -- tomorrow.

It's easy for us good white liberals to think we are sensitive about race relations. But we do not know what it's like to be pulled over again and again for minor traffic infractions like accelerating on the shoulder of a highway that everyone does. Sam knows that when he is pulled over, he is to keep his hands on the steering wheel until cleared to move them by the officer that pulled him over. Cheri knows that a hundred drivers will be ignored by police for talking on a hand-held cell phone but she will be pulled over. As she said to me not too long ago when I mentioned something heinous that George Zimmerman's defense said, "So? I've been under the bus so long I'm used to it."

It isn't that we didn't know George Zimmerman would be acquitted. From the very beginning, this case was less about evidence than it was about "He said....he said" -- except one of the "he"s is dead and can't speak. Zimmerman made sure of that. He made sure that only HIS story would ever see the light of day. And so today, a seventeen-year-old who was an "A" and "B" student, from a college-educated family with a brother in college, who went to a convenience store to buy candy and a soda for a young relative, lies six feet under the dirt, and his murderer walks free -- free to continue to rake in money from the pencil-dick phony tough guys who populate Fox Newa and talk radio. Free to believe he can rid the world of people he deems to be a problem with his gun. Free to do it again.

How on earth can we go on as a nation? How can we continue to live like this? Five years ago a black man stood on the steps of the Capitol and took the oath of office of the Presidency of the United States. And while liberal America was patting its own back at this great achievement, the giant rock that had covered up the racist, rotten core of the red states was turned over and all the hate and bile that had lain dormant during the Reagan and Bush years and during the Clintonian Sister Souljah interregnum, came spewing out. "Kenya" became code for "the 'N' word". "Anti-colonial" became code for the "N" word. Birthers were simply saying "Can't you see that man is a ni--?". "Voter fraud" became code for "Ni----s are voting, we have to stop them." So were the others who talked about racial preferences and Michelle Obama's derrière and circulated photos of Obama's face photoshopped on some Disney idea of an African indigenous tribe member.

And then just a few weeks ago, no less than the Supreme Court decided to look at that period of dormancy instead of the reality that has black neighborhoods stiffed on voting machines, black names purged from voter roles, Voter ID laws, mass vote suppression of all those who might vote against racism and hate and white supremacy. John Roberts and Samuel Alito ushered in the new Jim Crow era, after making sure that the country was set up to ensure that those who could enforce it were ensconced safely in their Congressional seats for life.

We don't know what Trayvon Martin could have been. He could have succumbed to the streets, or he could have gone to college and graduate school and invented something to make fossil fuels obsolete. He could have become a drug dealer or a doctor. He could have been a deadbeat dad or the doting father of his children and a loving husband. We don't know, and now we never will. But he deserved the chance to choose his own destiny, not to have it taken from him by a loser with doubts about his own manhood who thinks shooting an unarmed kid holding a bag of candy and a soft drink makes him somehow a tough guy with a big swinging dick.

We used to look at photos of Emmett Till and think it was years ago. Now we have our own Emmett Till. We should all engrave Trayvon Martin's face into our brains for all the time we are on this earth. Because until we the people do something about laws that let assholes like George Zimmerman declare open season on black teens, his death is all of our shame.

Also, too.

Labels: , , ,

2 comments
Bookmark and Share
Sunday, March 25, 2012

You can't transplant something that wasn't there in the first place
Posted by Jill | 9:16 AM
I wonder who got bumped down the list for this:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was recovering Saturday at a Virginia hospital after receiving a heart transplant, his office said.

Cheney was in the Intensive Care Unit of Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, his office said.

Cheney, 71, who served as vice president in the George W. Bush administration, has had a long history of heart trouble and has been on the cardiac transplant list for more than 20 months.

Although the former Vice President and his family do not know the identity of the donor, they will be forever grateful for this lifesaving gift," aide Kara Ahern said in a written statement that was authenticated by several close associates of the former vice president.

I hope the donor wasn't this woman:

A 32-year-old woman from Iraq who was found severely beaten next to a threatening note saying "go back to your country" died on Saturday.

Shaima Alawadi's 17-year-old daughter found her unconscious in a pool of blood Wednesday morning in the dining room of the house in El Cajon, police Lt. Steve Shakowski said.

"(They) took my mother away from me ... took my best friend away from me. Why?" the victim's daughter Fatima Al Himidi told KUSI-TV. She added that her mother had been beaten on the head with a tire iron.

Hanif Mohebi, the director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he met with Alawadi’s family members Saturday morning and was told the mother of five was taken off life support around 3 p.m.

"The family is in shock at the moment. They’re still trying to deal with what happened," Mohebi said.

Mohebi said the family had been in the United States since the mid-1990s.

Al Himidi told KUSI-TV her mother had been beaten on the head repeatedly with a tire iron, and that the note said "go back to your country, you terrorist."

Isn't it wonderful to know that one of the primary architects of the environment in which Shaima Alawadi's murderer could flourish is going to be with us for a while longer. /snark

Labels: , ,

4 comments
Bookmark and Share
Thursday, March 22, 2012

And so the Republican line of succession continues...
Posted by Jill | 6:02 AM
Was anyone actually surprised yesterday to hear that Jeb Bush had endorsed Mitt Romney? The man who was SUPPOSED to be the next member of America's self-appointed Family of Nobles to ascend to the White House was ALWAYS going to endorse Romney. Whether this means that Jeb is the pick for the #2 spot remains to be seen, though under Republican tradition, if he isn't, that would make Rick Santorum the Heir Apparent for 2016.

But even if he isn't, this country should never, ever forget that it was Jeb Bush, the man who insisted that the corpse of Terri Schiavo be ventilated forever in the name of being "pro-life", who signed Florida's "stand your ground" law that will in all likelihood let George Zimmerman, who went out packing a gun to go hunting for black males on a regular basis, get away with the cold-blooded murder of Trayvon Martin. I'm calling on myself and my compatriots to not let any mention of Jeb Bush go by ever again without a photograph or mention of Trayvon Martin attacdhed to it. Because this country, when it forgets (as it will) what Jeb Bush's brother did to this country, it must never be allowed to forget just who it was that made it legal to kill people because of the invented "threat" of their race. I want the face of Trayvon Martin to haunt Jeb Bush's dreams for the rest of his life.

Labels: , , , ,

1 comments
Bookmark and Share
Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Meanwhile, back in racist Amerikkka...
Posted by Jill | 7:06 PM
Charles Johnson waded into the fetid swamp of Fox News' comment section to see what the hatemongers are saying today about Trayvon Martin...so you don't have to.

Labels: , , , , ,

0 comments
Bookmark and Share
Tuesday, March 20, 2012

The crime of walking while black
Posted by Jill | 5:30 AM
I haven't posted yet about Trayvon Martin because frankly, I don't even know what to say. I don't know what to say because every time I look at the photos of a smiling kid who's now dead for the crime of carrying a can of iced tea and a bag of skittles while walking around a neighborhood in which a sloped-foreheaded asshole fancies himself to be Florida's own Sheriff Joe Arpaio, I just start to cry and I can't stop.

Oh, I'm sure that the fact that I have been working 7 days a week for the last four weeks doesn't help, nor does the fact that I can't seem to sleep more than 5-6 hours a night when I really need 7-8 hours. But it's more than that. It's thinking back to January 20, 2009, when for a couple of minutes, we envisioned this country as it could be...as it SHOULD be, one in which a man (or woman, or a 17-year-old kid) could be judged by the content of his character instead of the color of his skin. It's looking at the American landscape now, in which this country's first black president has been, and continues to be, hounded about his birth certificate by self-appointed vigilantes just like the murderer of Trayvon Williams and the police department that for some inexplicable reason is protecting him. It's looking at a country in which a candidate for president of a major political party can dogwhistle in a way that's hardly even dogwhistling, calling the current occupant of the White House "the food stamp president". It's a country in which someone can put out a bumper sticker reading "Don't Re-Nig in 2012" and insist it's not racist. I would be tempted to say that it's a good thing that the racists and hatemongers who populate this nation have felt safe in coming out from the rocks under which they live, because now we know where they stand and we can expose them, except that the life of an unarmed 17-year-old kid is too high a price to pay for a "dialogue" that isn't going to be a dialogue at all.

I have two black colleagues with whom I'm pretty close. One of them is a man in his 40's who's experienced firsthand what it's like to be pulled over for "driving while black." Another is a woman who has a teenage son. Yesterday I went to work and while the three of us talk about current events all the time, Trayvon Martin's name didn't come up at all. I don't know what my colleagues were thinking, but all I wanted to do was say, "I'm so sorry" and wonder how the heck they can even LOOK at a white person as a friend or ally today.

The sounds of Trayvon Martin screaming for help in a neighborhood, a town, a state, a nation that didn't give a shit about him echo throughout the country. They are etched into my brain and my memory for the long as I live. I will never, ever forget what I heard on those police dispatch recordings. It's a sound that could come out of any black person you know or that you don't, on any given day, just because someone believed that they didn't deserve to walk the earth because of the color of their skin. THAT is the truth about America. And that a black man emerges from the White House every day doesn't change that one iota.

A few other thoughts:

At the Crunk Feminist Collective: Re-Nigging on the Promises: #Justice4Trayvon

ThinkProgress: What Everyone Should Know About Trayvon Martin (1995-2012)

John McWhorter, The Atlantic: What a Florida Teenager’s Death Tells Us About Being Black in America

Adam Weinstein at Mother Jones: The Trayvon Martin Killing, Explained, including some interesting history about race and the Sanford Police Department.

Lawrence O'Donnell:


When Jonathan Capehart knows that he too could be targeted by racist self-appointed "Neighborhood Watch" gun nuts for the crime of walking while black, it's time to stop deluding ourselves that we are "past all that." We aren't. And unless people like George Zimmerman face the full brunt of the law and there is UNIVERSAL outrage about what happened to Trayvon Martin, and what could happen to any black man anywhere in this country, we won't be. And it is to our shame that we aren't.

Also, this.

Labels: , ,

4 comments
Bookmark and Share
Tuesday, August 09, 2011

So...you want to maybe rethink that notion, dude?
Posted by Jill | 5:32 AM
John McWhorter at Forbes.com, December 30, 2008:
So, in answer to the question, "Is America past racism against black people," I say the answer is yes.

Of course, nothing magically changed when Obama was declared president-elect. However, our proper concern is not whether racism still exists, but whether it remains a serious problem. The election of Obama proved, as nothing else could have, that it no longer does.


I guess this, then, is not a serious problem:
Video has surfaced implicating seven white teenagers in a gruesome June 26 Mississippi hate crime that left one black man mutilated and dead.

The recently released footage shows the teens beating and ultimately running over 49-year-old James Craig Anderson. The suspects reportedly left a Hinds County, Mississippi party together with the intention of finding a black victim and drove to a nearby predominantly black area of Jackson where they attacked Anderson, the first black man they saw upon exiting the highway.


I would be interested in how much anti-Obama vitriol was spewed by the parents of these men. For more on what this means to actual people, go read what Pam has to say.

Labels: ,

2 comments
Bookmark and Share