Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I just wrote this, in response to siderea asking for people's advice on who to vote for, and why:

Patalano: she promises to reduce cash bail and work against mass incarceration and the racism that permeates decisions about who is indicted and for what.

I am also to some extent voting against Ryan [the incumbent], for her/her office's behavior and foot-dragging over setting aside the tainted drug lab convictions. (I was one of I don't know how many people calling to say "these are all based on fraudulent drug "testing" results, set them aside and release the victims now," and what I got was staffers who clearly had no idea of what to do with calls from the public. The relevant part of their voice mail system wanted to give me instructions on how to appeal any specific one of those cases, or get information on the status of a single case, when the point was that she shouldn't be waiting for phone calls and paperwork for "release this person, he's in prison on entirely bogus charges" in each case. I want a DA whose reaction to a widely publicized and clear set of injustices won't be "here's how to fill out paperwork to set aside 1% of it."

Someone was talking about her frustration in dealing with Baby Boomers who respond to a discussion of an ongoing social problem with "But I thought we'd fixed that" (as in, the respondent was surprised and disbelieving that it still happened).

It occurred to me that in some ways these recurrent problems are like a mutant virus: you got your flu shot in 1975, or even 2007, but that doesn't do much (if anything) to protect you from the flu in 2011. They lurk in various places in the society, and one of the things that helps them lurk is the belief that they don't exist anymore: if you walk into a doctor's office and they don't even think that it might be scarlet fever, they won't give you the appropriate medication. Getting rid of a specific sexually harassing boss or racist cop doesn't mean that the workplace as a whole is now free of that, or that the police department culture has been fixed and all the racists are off the force or have seen the error of their ways.

(Or maybe I'm posting too early in the morning. Links deliberately omitted.)

It took Rupert Murdoch's New York Post about a month to go from putting the oath of office on the front page of the paper to publishing a stupid, racist cartoon about President Obama. I'm not linking to it here, because it's ugly, offensive, and not remotely funny. I can't boycott the post, because I stopped reading it years ago for reasons only partly political. (When I was growing up, before the Murdoch days, my parents got it as well as the NY Times, because the Post had late sports results and cartoons.)

I was reminded of this by a friend who posted, comments disabled, but with a link to a story that included the cartoon. She expressed surprise that it wasn't all over her friends list; I suspect this is a combination of people figuring it's been mentioned in the regular press and doesn't need to be discussed here, and a weary "yes, it's run by obnoxious right-wingers, big surprise." The president's press secretary settled for a remark to the effect that the NY Post isn't very newsworthy.

This was a comment to a discussion in bcholmes's journal, after BC linked to sparkymonster tallking about the racism involved in blaming black voters for Proposition 8. I was going to save it for my next "misc. comments" post, but I think it's worth getting out there now, not in a month or two:

I also note that this is a convenient way of ignoring the white people who organized and mostly led the anti-marriage forces. It wasn't black churches that wrote Proposition 8, and it wasn't black Obama supporters who put it on the ballot and wrote those dishonest ads. It was middle- and upper-class straight white people.

I suspect that most of the white gay and bisexual people who are blaming black voters right now are more likely to be sitting down at a family dinner with middle-class, straight white bigots than with black heterosexuals, and sitting down to dinner together will be easier if they can ignore the idea that their relatives are part of why this thing passed.

I hadn't planned to post as part of the International Blog Against Racism Week, because I didn't think I had anything insightful to say. Then I was reading comments to elisem's IBARW post about jokes, and the ways she tensed up at some kinds of introductions, and the occasional joke that turns the assumptions on their head. And shadowhwk's comment led me to say this:

Doing the right thing from inferior motives is still doing the right thing.

Someone who doesn't steal because she believes it is inherently wrong, or thinks about the potential victim, may be a better person than someone who doesn't steal because she's worried about being sent to jail. But either is better than someone who figures what the hell, he'll steal because it's what he wants to do and there's no point suppressing his impulses.

The point of challenging racism isn't that it makes me a better person. It's that racism is evil and destructive and should be challenged, whether I do it from compassion, abstract belief in justice, or even guilt. It's not as though feeling guilty and not challenging racism helps anything.