Guest post:: MIchael Cook on racism

On March, 14, I received an email from a friend in Newburyport that had a forwarded joke attached. The person who sent the original forward to my friend is a highly regarded, successful retired business man, who, as my friend has often told me, is one of greater Newburyport's wealthiest long time residents - not to mention a staunch Republican.

The forwarded "joke" was titled, "Our Dog Spot".

It went like this; Spot's owner goes down to the local welfare office to try and sign Spot up for benefits.

The clerk tells Spot's owner, according to agency guidelines, dogs do not qualify for welfare benefits.

Spot's owner then explains to the clerk that Spot is lazy, unemployed, speaks no English, and has no idea who his daddy is.

The punch lines? "Spot gets his first check next Friday. Is this a great country or what?"

I suppose I took offense at such an ignorant and bigoted "joke" because I, for a decade, have very much a part of a family that is multi-racial and multi-lingual whose members include doctors, lawyers, very successful businesspeople, school teachers, and stay at home moms who raise children with a level of manners and respect for their elders that is sorely missing in many American kids these days, even those who come from families headed by people like the original forwarder of this 'joke".

Now, I firmly believe my friend's wealthy, retired, white, Republican friend has every right to tell, and e-mail, such vile and bigoted attempts at humor, after all, Oliver Wendell Holmes said it best; and I'm paraphrasing a bit but, if one really believes in free speech, one has to be prepared to defend the speech one hates the most.

But that said, I also firmly believe every decent American who understands and rejects the hateful and bigoted subtexts of such lame attempts at "humor", has an obligation to stand up and call such "comedians" out, even if they are wealthy, retired, white, GOP pillars of greater Newburyport society.

This kind of ''humor" is anything but funny. And the fact it is being passed around on the internet among Newburyporters should be a wake-up call that, despite all the touchy feely, New Agey gobbledeegook about Newburyport being a "No
Place for Hate" community, and all the media attention the Martin Luther King Day breakfast gets, the fact is bigotry is alive and well in Newburyport.

What saddens, even frightens, me, is that it is alive and well among people like my friend's wealthy, white, well educated, retired, Republican friend. No other proof of that reality is needed beyond this most recent ignorant and bigoted "joke" this "pillar" of Newburyport society is spreading on the internet.

Michael Cook
Puerto Viejo de Limon, CR
& Nbpt

Rant of the day

Harking back to Tom Salemi's post on the election - I don't want to raise trouble on his blog, so I'll rant on my own blog this time.

Black liberation theology???? X, what the hell does that mean?

If you are who I think you are, you know me. You've spoken with me. You think I'm dangerous? I mean, you may not agree with me about a lot of things, but do you think I'm dangerous?

I've written about empathy before. That's where you feel the pain of others.

Until you've been followed around in stores, been stopped numerous times by the police for bogus reasons, or, you know, been considered to be sub-human, I would say ... well, I won't say it.

This election result has done more to forward race relations in this country than anything else could have.

If someone can't see that, then God help them.

And by the way, lots of people sit in church and listen to stuff they don't necessarily believe. Look at all the Catholics on birth control.

In fact, listening to the rhetoric of hate might inspire a person to go out and try to make a difference (or prove it wrong, for the most part) ... hmmmm, now there's a thought.

Is this sexist? (Part II)

This, believe it or not, is what I started out to post about in the last post of the same title as this one: women drivers!

I remember a while ago now, March 11 to be exact, being a little miffed at this post on Peter McClelland's blog, McClelland Miscellanea. He also submitted it as a letter to the Daily News.

I was also guessing that the young mother with the cell phone on the ear in one hand, steering wheel in the other, young kid in the backseat, and dog further back might appear in the letter [a previous letter to the DN, seeking a woman race car driver]. When the light changed, around the corner she went with a one-hand turn, no directional, and little interest in the rate of speed. There was no way that she was paying sufficient attention to driving. Dangerous? You bet.

My recent experiences driving around town, however, have changed my tune.

Yesterday, while both on the way to and coming home from Port Plaza in my Jetta, I was almost nailed three times by cars being driven by women, each one of which was talking on a cell phone.

I started paying attention (a little) and noticed that few, if any, men drive while talking on a cell phone.

Then I recalled a friend telling me about a friend of hers who has a second-floor office on Liberty St., near Abe's. He told her it was entertaining to each morning watch women trying to park their SUVs on the street while simultaneously holding, and talking into, a cell phone.

Actually, he mostly was in fear of one of them bashing his sports car.

I don't get what's so all-fired important that you can't wait until you're not driving to take a phone call. The other day, I laughed openly at the neighbor when I saw her pull away in her car and 30 seconds later she was on the phone - to me.

"Didn't I just see you drive off?" I asked.

People take calls during ball games, during dinner in restaurants, on boats, during social gatherings ... sometimes they relay that it's an urgent call, but mostly it's just someone wanting to chat. They chat.

But back to driving. I know from personal experience that talking on a cell phone is distracting. I once backed into a car behind mine, not because I was on a cell phone, but because I was on the phone while walking up to my car. When I parked there, on Pleasant St. at 8:30 in the morning, there was no car parked behind my car.

Because I was on the phone, and it was only about 2 minutes later, I did not notice that a car had parked behind mine in the interim.

Note: I do, however, occasionally see men driving with a newspaper propped up on the steering wheel. Less often, I see women applying makeup - but I was recently in a car driven by Triple-D, on I-93, when she decided to apply mascara.

Tell the person you'll call them back when you're not driving. Please?

Probems of all kinds

Well I've got problems - with the blog, with Comcast, with my computer, with my psyche, whatever.

But I want to post about identity. I finished The Garden of Last Days (Dubus' new book) this morning and it did not break my heart. It is brilliant, but it did not break my heart.

It made me think. My thoughts led me to what he said to me yesterday, about remembering my hair. And then I was posting comments and Bubba had used the word "progressive," and I started to think about labels.

I am neither black nor white, American or English or Barbadian or Irish, not totally liberal in my thinking (although I am definitely not a conservative in any way, shape or form) and I'm sick and tired of people judging or making assessments about me because of how I look.

I envy all of you who can say definitively what you are, because I cannot. I envy all of you who can say that someone remembered you because of your good character (or bad character, as the case may be) and not because of your racial makeup.

I wish it were different, but it's not. It's not different anywhere else, either.

This weekend, in addition to the incident yesterday, I was part of another interaction in which I felt I was being assessed and found to be wanting, based on my appearance. I'm not going to go into that one but believe me, it did not make me feel very good.

I'm down in the dumps, not because of the book, but the book contributed to it. I recommend that everyone read it, and House of Sand and Fog (I have not read his other novel, Bluesman) and maybe you'll get some perspective into what it's like to be superficially JUDGED and also what it's like to be the JUDGE.

That's it. Oh, except I wish I had that garden.

Barbados:time for DNA testing

I was reminded of my Barbados family not only by the Rev. Wright/Obama situation, but by emails I began getting over the weekend about an "Austin Clan get together."

There are a lot of us Austin cousins - my grannie was one of 12 children. Actually, one died tragically from a gunshot wound when he was a child and one never married so there are descendants of 10 Austins that we're talking about here.

I could do this a lot better if I could actually find my papers on the ancestry (I recently had a "spring clean" so have no idea where anything is anymore. These things used to be very handily located in a pile by the couch.)

I commend whatever family member (I suspect it was my older first cousin, Anne) who put us all in one list.

The emails flying back and forth confirm that no one has been able to go back beyond my great-great grandfather, William Agard Austin (had to correct my previous post about that).

I know that I don't have the most extensive readership on this blog but I'm hoping someone somewhere has some information. There was a brother of, I believe, Charles Miller Austin who left the island and was never heard from again. A lot of Barbadians immigrated to New England (and Toronto) but frankly, great-grandfather Miller Austin was the oldest child and he probably knew the most about the ancestors.

Which isn't much, apparently.

My very tangled roots (slightly corrected)

I keep thinking I have to take a day off from blogging then ideas spring into my head and I have to write them before they spring back out again.

That happens a lot and is an excellent reason why I should take the personal recording gizmo out of the drawer, replace the batteries, and carry it around with me at all times.

The sermon at the First Parish Church and the talk about Rev. Wright resulted in a lot of thoughts whirling around (after they had sprung into) my head.

I have mentioned on here before that I am, like Barack Obama, of mixed-race parentage. My mother is English-Irish and my (biological) father is West Indian. The other day a woman from Commonwealth Health asked me what my racial heritage is.

This is a huge question for me since West Indians, of course, do not consider themselves 'African-American' (not being Americans at all, you see).

Anyway, that's not my point.

I have lived always with the understanding that some of my paternal ancestors were black slaves and some were white Europeans.

Despite what you may think, it's not easy knowing that even some of your ancestors were enslaved.

Apart from the obvious dismay, also we can't trace my grandmother's ancestors at all. I have no idea who they were until we get to my great-grandfather, Charles Miller Austin, who was of my complexion (light) and was the result, we always believed, of some kind a relationship between a European planter and what probably by then was a freed slave.

All we know about his father is that his name was William Agard Austin and his wife was Harriet Fields. William's mother was called, "Baba." Sounds a lot Irish to me, but that may be because of the song by the Who, "Baba O'Riley."

BUT - lately I found out that, before Africans were rounded off and shipped 'in bulk' to work the plantations on Barbados, Irish 'rebels' were rounded up by the British government and shipped off wholesale to the island (there is a book about it, called "To Hell or Barbados," which I have yet to buy). How this fact escaped my notice for this long is beyond me.

No record was made of their names and they were given to the planters. Most of them died from heat exhaustion. A brief write-up on being "Barbadosed" can be found here.

This probably is what led to the 'brilliant' idea of importing even more people who were used to heat. I'm sure it was a huge irritant to the English planters that the Irish kept dying on them.

In any case, the Irish and the black slaves, seeing as how they had so much in common at this point, banded together, rebelled together and inter-married. In fact, the patois spoken in Barbados, called Bajan, is said to be a mix of Irish and African speech patterns. Few of these Irish were left to be identified as such by an 1880 census.

What did remain was a small population of poor whites, often called 'redlegs', who may be the descendants of the Barbadosed Irish. Since my great-grandfather, Charles Miller Austin, is referred to in some historical documents as a "redleg,"I can only conclude he was one of these.

He was the first "mulatto" to break the monopoly of white plantocracy in the parish of St. John - he bought Eastmont plantation in 1895 and Malvern plantation in 1910. My brother Miller now owns Eastmont, which is where my grandmother was born, and every member of the family has stock in the plantation land at Malvern. Malvern House was sold off years ago, to the Moravian Church.

So, you see, I realized that not only one part of my ancestry involves slavery - but perhaps ALL of it (on my father's side) does. Which might explain why we also can't trace our St. John ancestors earlier than 1723, when one Charles St. John married Isabella Clarke.

(My grandmother, born Lucy Austin, married Albert St. John. I never knew him; he died when my father was young.)

In stark contrast to my St. John relatives, who want to believe Charles St. John was part of the noble English St. John family - even though we can find no evidence of this in the well-documented St. John family line - I believe he either adopted the name or that was the name given to him (or possibly his father) by the English colonial government in Barbados. They probably worked a plantation in St. John parish.

It's a point of contention.