#29. Reality TV

It started with Edtv, only to be followed by The Truman Show. Soon, a decision was made to emulate fiction with Survivor, Temptation Island, Big Brother, The Real World and other cheaply produced television shows that required no long-term contracts with moody actors, just casting calls from an untapped pool of millions of untalented people desiring their 15 minutes of fame.

Fear Factor, American Idol, America’s Got Talent followed. Americans have a fascination with being inundated with the trivial, following intently the lives of the rich and famous. Living vicariously as the seventh “Friend” on the show Friends, those who watch television develop an intimate relationship with the actors who portray characters they grow to love.

Shows like The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and Dancing with the Stars provide ample glimpses at real people searching for love and striving to prove themselves as the most adept B-level star at learning dance routines that help pacify viewer’s otherwise uneventful nights.

The Biggest Loser grants viewers the opportunity to view the obese strive to lose unwanted pounds by competing in athletic competition.

Discovery and other channels have found the best way to fill time slots with shows such as Deadliest Catch, Man versus Wild, Dirty Jobs, Dog the Bounty Hunter and other shows that glorify those mundane individuals who live ordinary lives and toil away at their thankless vocation so that others may pursue more “meaningful” work.

Yet, watching a show like Dirty Jobs one is overwhelmed by the happy faces that greet the host Mike Rowe as he attempts to emulate the same vocation he is profiling. Though they lead simple lives the people featured on Dirty Jobs seem content and fortunate, though their routine task might induce vomit in both the viewer and Mike Rowe.

Incidentally, 90 – 95 percent of the jobs featured on Mike Rowe’s are done by white people. Though regular television shows have long been blasted as too white, reality TV is even whiter. The reason is one that Black people know, but to admit would be detrimental to their cause of greater diversity on television.

Reality TV shows both the best and worst of people. Watching COPS, a long-running show that pits camera crews with real-life police officers who deal with the refuse of society, one is overwhelmed by the images of Black people evading police.

Yet, few reality TV shows can deal with Black people in a true setting because whatever environment the show depicts Black people in will automatically be construed as racist. The Real Housewives series is an immensely popular show that details the lives of caddy, pretentious, pontificating, pedantic boorish women.

And yet, only The Real Housewives of Atlanta has received substantial negative publicity, largely due to the real-life personas the show highlights. Daring to showcase Black people in anything but positive light is a violation of the rules that Black Run America (BRA) and The Real Housewives of Atlanta bathed Black people in a most uncomfortable light:

Across the reality-television spectrum, there have always been women like Sheree and her ''friends'' on Bravo TV's The Real Housewives of Atlanta: catty, materialistic, self-absorbed. But are television executives really only interested in black women when we're acting a fool? And more importantly, are we really only interested in seeing ourselves portrayed in this light?

VH1 is a channel that devotes a significant block of time to Black-oriented shows and yet they strike a similar chord with those who view them. These reality shows only showcase Black people in the most realistic light, instead of creating contrived sitcom shows that feature make-believe Black people such as The Cosby Show.

One reality show that was to feature an obese Black family (in reality, the overwhelming majority of Black people are obese) received criticism for daring to dwell in fact instead of fiction:

The Cole family has a message for the detractors of their new TLC reality show: You're just making us more determined.

"I would tell them to keep saying what they are saying because it's not going to affect anything that we are doing," said 14-year-old Shayne Cole. "Basically all they are doing is giving us more publicity, so more power to them."

The Coles are the stars of "One Big Happy Family," which documents their struggle to slim down and live a healthier lifestyle.

The morbidly obese African-American family of four from North Carolina had a total combined weight of 1,377 pounds when the show began. The family's matriarch Tameka weighed in at 380 lbs., her 41-year-old husband Norris tipped the scales at 340 lbs., 16-year-old daughter Amber was 348 lbs. and Shayne was 308 lbs.

The series has come under fire from bloggers and critics for being potentially exploitive of the family, whose "fat and happy" attitude has drawn comparisons to the comedic Klump family from the Eddie Murphy film "The Nutty Professor."

"My main issue is that obesity is such a huge problem in the black community," said Jerry Barrow, senior editor of The Urban Daily.com. "It feels like the family is just being put under a spotlight to highlight how big they are."

Reality is a harsh mistress, as many would rather put their head in the sand then deal with the truth. And yet, reality TV shows real people (often times in contrived and scripted situations) in all their unedited glory.

For Black people, this is far too much. The Nightly News shows Black people in enough negative situations; for reality TV to inundate viewers with more truths is just too much for Black people to handle.

Black people hold out hope that viewers will only see reality in sports and put aside the harsh actuality of real Black life in America.

Stuff Black People Don’t Like includes reality TV, for the veracity that comes through on television sets throughout America must not include showcasing Black people in a negative light. Black contestants may partake in individual shows, but to dare show only Black people in a “real-life” situation is to invite ruin to a community already beyond repair.

Thank You for the Donations

A big thank you to those who have taken the time out of your busy day and schedule to donate and contribute money to this website; your donation will help to continue SBPDL’s growth and reach.

I can’t thank those who I may never meet in person enough for the generous donations that they have given, validating the work that has been put into site for the past year. It means more to me than words could ever express.

And one important notion must be pontificated: It has never been about the money, it’s about sending a message.

Go back and read this website from the beginning, and you’ll notice an evolution in the writing style and the overall editorial direction. What started as a joke became something else entirely.

Obviously, someone at Google – the most powerful company in the world – decided to take the drastic actions necessary to censor search algorithms that would return people to this website. Once, 200 – 300 people a day were directed here by typing “Michael Oher Story” into their Google search box.

Typing that into Google no longer returns this website as one of the top entries (prior to Google’s censorship, this website was the 3^rd or 4^th website returned for that particular search).

Again, thank you to those who donated. This website has become an avocation that is both enjoyable and a sad experience. Documenting the various pathologies that seem to be pervasive wherever Black people reside in America brings a tinge of despondency to my mind: it would mean that Disingenuous White Liberals and Crusading White Pedagogues every intention and objective is invalidated before any attempt is made to ameliorate the plight of Black people.

Perhaps that is the real purpose of this website – for however long it might remain operational. As the great United States Empire crumbles around us and people are left wondering what happened to the idea of American invincibility and exceptionalism as a situation that transpired in Greece or Iceland occurs here, one article regarding a scenario that transpired in Detroit provides all the evidence needed to prove that chaos will reign the day.

50,000 people in Detroit lined up for stimulus checks on the mere rumor that such checks were to be passed out. Imagine that same scenario in every major city across the nation.

Google has already declared war on a seemingly insignificant blog among the thousands, strike that, hundreds of thousands to millions of blogs that exist in cyber space.

This is why the move to a more secure hosting company must be made (and also a redesigned website), because Google could decide at any moment to pull the plug on hosting this website and once and for all rid the internet of a bothersome fly that dared point out that Black Run America (BRA) had about as much power as the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz.

Again, thanks to those who have contributed both your money and invested your time into enjoying this website. Those who send me emails – stuffblackpeople@gmail.com – with words of encouragement, story ideas, links or hostile questions and remarks motivate me to keep writing.

Those who part with their own money to help a website that dwells in ambiguity to point out the reality of life in 2010 America, well you motivate me to work even harder.

Thank you.

It was never about money, though. It’s about sending a message.

One could easily side with Black Run America, and become quite wealthy and comfortable in the maintenance of that idea. Perhaps those DWLs and CWPs who work to maintain BRA’s dominance have turned to the proverbial Dark Side, and their reward is continual employment for their subservience before the eventual diversity axe falls on their position.

BRA will end, but until that day one must know that it will still be wrong to be cognizant of the man behind the curtain. The key to understanding contemporary America is to comprehend the concept of BRA.

And now, the segue in the next entry, as reality tv must always exclude Black people from being the main stars. Sure, Black individuals can be participants of reality tv shows, but for an entire episodic television show to center around Black people would revel too much and confirm stereotypes that millions hold.

So stay tuned, SBPDL is just getting started.

Thanks again for reading!

Mein Obama Calls Black People "Eggplants"

You have to love Mein Obama. His ratings are failing dramatically, the voters who put him in the White House are fleeing with no sign of returning and yet Black people still love their man (though Gallup’s newest poll shows the lowest approval percentage of Obama by Black people since he took office – 85 percent approval).

Well, to halt the catastrophic popularity decline Mein Obama appeared on The View where he made these comments:

When asked about his background, which includes a black father and white mother, Obama said of African-Americans: "We are sort of a mongrel people."

"I mean we're all kinds of mixed up," Obama said. "That's actually true of white people as well, but we just know more about it."

The president's remarks were directed at the roots of all Americans. The definition of mongrel as an adjective is defined as "of mixed breed, nature, or origin," according to dictionary.com.

Obama did not appear to be making an inflammatory remark with his statement and the audience appeared to receive it in the light-hearted manner that often accompanies interviews on morning talk shows.

Mongrels? Who is that dude talking about? It is well-known that Mein Obama has been playing a lot of golf since he took office, so it is becoming glaringly obvious that he has bought into the idea of the Brown Paper Bag Test so that he can play 18-holes at lily-white courses.

Black people are proud to be Black and the mere mention of a mongrelized past coupled with an amalgamated genetic present is unsettling, especially coming from Mein Obama.

Is he calling Black people part eggplant, a la Dennis Hopper in True Romance?

A “mongrelized people” is an incredibly unpleasant and contemptuous manner in describing anyone, let alone an entire race. And Mein Obama has just decried the race he chooses to identify with as mongrelized and unauthentic, not exactly endearing terminology.

One person dared preempt Mein Obama by asking how white are Black people, but his question went largely ignored:

How white are blacks? How black are whites?

Because African-Americans and European-Americans have been in contact, sometimes intimate, since 1619, these questions are central to Americans' collective self-understanding. In recent years, genetic techniques for accurately determining the answers have finally become available.

Molecular anthropologist Mark D. Shriver heads a group of nine population researchers at Penn State University who are going beyond the arbitrary "one drop of blood" rule to answer these ancient questions about the family trees of the typical American "black" and "white."

They have examined DNA samples from 3,000 individuals in 25 locations around America, mostly self-identified African-Americans, looking for the gene markers that tend to differ between Europeans and Africans.

Shriver pointed out that genetically tracking admixture is difficult because differences even between subraces, such as Scandinavian versus West African, account for only about ten percent of human genetic variation. "Thus, we are all more alike than we are different," he noted.

Besides illuminating American history, Shriver hopes to use his ability to determine racial admixture to locate genes associated with illnesses that affect one race more than the other -- such as diabetes, prostate cancer, and hypertension, which are more prevalent among African-Americans, and dementia and osteoporosis among whites.

The subject of black-white admixture is particularly complicated because, since the later 17th Century, Americans with virtually any visible sub-Saharan African ancestry (the so-called "one drop of blood") have been socially categorized as simply African. Only recently has society begun to tolerate individuals like Tiger Woods (who is one-half East Asian, one-quarter sub-Saharan African, one-eighth European, and one-eighth Native American) defining themselves as anything other than as African. Indeed, Woods was criticized by some African-Americans in 1997, following the first of his three Masters' victories, for not submitting to the "one drop" definition.

Is mixed race ancestry fairly typical for an American? In two ways, it is. First, more than 50 million whites, according to his analyses, have at least one black ancestor.

Another way to approach the question is to group together all the whites and blacks in America and calculate their mean degree of admixture. Shriver's data shows that on average, they would be about 12 or 13 percent African.

Yet, from another perspective, a sizable degree of racial mixing is highly unusual. There simply aren't many African-Americans or European-Americans who are mostly white but also substantially black. Shriver pointed out, "There is a very small degree of overlap in the population distributions." In America, most of the whites are extremely European and most of the blacks are quite African.

Despite the notorious arbitrariness of the "one drop" rule, the actual American population conforms to its strictures surprisingly closely.

Granted, the "one drop" rule would be laughed out of existence if anyone attempted to impose it on a land with a more genetically blended population, such as Puerto Rico (which Shriver has begun to study). Yet, it appears possible that the rule survives in the U.S. because it's not too wildly inaccurate. Only a small fraction of the population is more than half, but less than 90 percent European.

Among self-identified whites in Shriver's sample, the average black admixture is only 0.7 percent. That's the equivalent of having among your 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents (who lived around two centuries ago), 127 whites and one black.

It appears that 70 percent of whites have no African ancestors. Among the 30 percent who do, the black admixture is around 2.3 percent, which would be like having about three black ancestors out of those 128.

In contrast, African-Americans are much more racially mixed than European-Americans. Yet, Shriver's study shows that they are less European that was previously believed.

Earlier, cruder studies, done before direct genetic testing was feasible, suggested that African-Americans were 25 or even 30 percent white. Shriver's project is not complete, but with data from 25 sites already in, he is coming up with 17-18 percent white ancestry among African-Americans. That's the equivalent of 106 of those 128 of your ancestors from seven generations ago having been Africans and 22 Europeans.

According to Shriver, only about 10 percent of African-Americans are over 50 percent white.

This genetic database is restricted to adults. Black-white married couples quadrupled in number between the 1960 Census and 1990 Census, so the admixture rates among children are no doubt higher than among adults.

One can only laugh at the idea of the one-drop rule, until the reality of current pop star Rihanna being bullied for the sin of being white in Barbados is uncovered.

For the authentic Black people in Barbados, Rihanna looked too white. When confronted with such distressing knowledge – since Rihanna is a symbol of “Black” sexuality in America – what is one to take from Mein Obama’s declaration of Black people being mongrelized?

Recall that in the sordid history of Haiti, mongrelized (or partially white) Black people were slaughtered by pure, authentic Black people (of the darker variety).

A scene from an insipid Kevin Costner film sums up this entire debate in the eyes of authentic Black people (unlike the half-white Barry Soetoro who dares call “his” people mongrelized), courtesy of General Bethlehem.

Like it or not, America in 2010 is finally getting that discussion on race.

Can't Hardly Wait - White Boy Beaten for Listening to Rap

Some people have been worrying rap music is going soft, the hardcore nature of the genre removed so as to be more palatable to a larger purchasing segment of the population.

This isn't the case in Florida, where a white boy listened intently to rap music only to find his selection of music distasteful to a Black individual who proved with his actions that those who form the natural market for hip hop aren't going soft:

PALM BAY, Fla. (AP) — Authorities in coastal Florida say a black teenager is accused of attacking a white man for listening to rap music and could be charged with a hate crime.

Police took the 14-year-old Palm Bay boy into custody late Monday and charged him with battery.

Police spokeswoman Yvonne Martinez says the teen could face a hate-crime enhancement charge because he showed “extreme prejudice against the victim because of his race.”

Martinez says the teen told the 22-year-old victim to stop listening to rap music because “white people shouldn’t listen to rap music.” The teen then struck him in the face.

The state attorney’s office will review the charges. It wasn’t immediately known if the teen has an attorney.

Taking a stand in defense and pride in your particular races most stirring musical accomplishments is no vice; a white boy voluntarily listening to rap when no white girls are present is no virtue.

This whole story brings to mind the pathetic character played by Seth Green in the late 1990s film Can't Hardly Wait. A wannabe rapper and so-called wigger, Green's character was routinely made fun of for his poser disposition and comes across as one of the more pathetic and least sympathetic characters in the film.

SBPDL couldn't help but think of the hilarious image of former rapper tycoon Suge Knight holding white boy rapper Vanilla Ice by his legs over a balcony in a blatant attempt at intimidation when this story was spotted on the invaluable website Newsone (a project of Black Planet).

White people (unless it's a girl) being embraced by the hip-hop community has always been a sore subject for rappers, as this form of communication is one of the purest and most authentic Black forms of self-expression.

That white people would excel in rap should be as rare as white people excelling at tailback in football.

Regardless, white people shouldn't be listening to rap anyways according to our Black friend in Florida. Well, white people do consume vast amounts of hip hop and purchase a fair share of the songs by popular artists via buying cd's, iTunes and of course, the illegally downloaded song.

Would hip hop/rap be as popular without white people embracing it?

Interesting, the rap industry has always had a difficult relationship with white people:

By the United States 2000 Census, three quarters of the United States' population is white, while one eighth is black. However, most mainstream rappers in the United States are black.^[1] Some believe this discrepancy is a good thing; popular rapper Kanye West has said: "I hate music where white people are trying to sound black. The white music I like is white", but he says that he likes Eminem because he's talented and got skills.^[2][3]

Discussion

While they have been successful, artists such as the Beastie Boys, a rap group that is predominately Caucasian Jewish teenagers, were sometimes labeled as sub-categories of hip hop music, such as alternative. White hip hop artists have advanced the genre of rap by bringing in a larger and more diverse audience and recognition for rap as a musical genre, however they have had much less of an effect on the overall musical trajectory of the rap scene than their counterparts.^[4] The Beastie Boys managed to sell millions of records while maintaining the respect of the hip hop community.^[5]

Another notable mention is the classic Hip-Hop group from the late 1980s and early 1990s 3rd Bass, composed of two white Jewish MCs, MC Serch and Pete Nice and their DJ, African-American DJ Richie Rich. The group had two critically-acclaimed albums, 1989's The Cactus Album and 1991's Derelicts of Dialect, both on the Def Jam label and both reaching gold in record sales.

Canadian rapper MC Shadow (Get Loose Crew and as a solo artist JUST Me) is regarded as a hip hop music pioneer being both the first caucasian recording artist and first to achieve international sales for a rap record from that country.

Wealth and class have always been significant issues in hip hop, a culture which was developed mainly among the lower and lower-middle class blacks of inner-city New York. Any view of money that can be seen in real life can also be seen in the lyrics of rap—just as there are rappers who often brag about their extravagant wealth or more specifically their "rags to riches" stories, there are political militants who decry materialism. Although most of hip hop's famous and influential rappers have come from inner-city ghettos,^[6] hip hop has always represented a variety of economic backgrounds. For example, Run-D.M.C., Beastie Boys, Rakim, Black Sheep, and Kanye West^[7] were middle-class when they began rapping.

Race issues often intersect with class issues. Rapper Vanilla Ice was born in Dallas, Texas, but raised in South Florida.^[8] After gaining success on the underground scene, the rapper signed to major label SBK Records, who manufactured a false background in promotional materials, including a biography written by his manager, Tommy Quon, and attributed to Vanilla Ice, claiming that the rapper was born in the inner-city of Miami, Florida. Van Winkle has since regretted the book's publication, stating "I went overseas, I came back and people were asking me these weird questions and I couldn't understand them and then they said, 'well, your story is not matching with your bio,' and I said 'What bio?' and they pulled one out and I read it and I said, 'Who wrote this? Where'd you get this from?' And I had to hire these investigators to find out where the fuck this came from and nobody would really fess up to it [..] but the damage was already done. I was already labeled like a liar [...] I grew up in Dallas, I never denied that, I've never lied".^[9] House of Pain, an Irish-American crew from New York, were assertive about their ethnicity, including footage of a St. Patrick's Day parade in the music video for their first hit single Jump Around and name-dropping prominent Irish Americans in their lyrics. They also incorporated time signatures associated with traditional Irish folk music such as jigs and reels into their songs—a major deviation from mainstream hip hop where virtually every song is done in 4/4 time.

The most recent mainstream exception to the skin color trend in mainstream rap is Eminem, who is of mainly Scottish descent, and who grew up in the city of Warren, MI near Detroit.^[10] In his song "White America", Eminem attributes his selling success to his being more easily digestible by a white audience, because he "looks like them."

According to musicologist Arthur Kempton, "Today 70 percent of hip-hop is bought by white kids".^[11]. There are no demographic studies with consistent results to support these claims and some, such as author Bakari Kitwana, believe that these numbers are used politically in order to, for example, play down the buying power of young African-Americans.^[12]

Boots Riley has criticized these figures, pointing out that they only count SoundScan sales, which exclude the mom-and-pop record stores located in majority black and Latino neighborhoods that major music chains tend to avoid, and thus dramatically underrepresents the number of sales made in such communities According to political rapper Zion of Zion I, socially conscious hip hop in particular has a majority white audience: "...so many black people don't want to hear it. They want that thug shit." In addition to Zion, several other underground rappers such as Boots Riley of The Coup, report nearly all white audiences.^[13]

Rapper Pitbull described hardships breaking into the Rap industry because he is white and Cuban.^[14]

White rappers and white people who consume vast amounts of rap music begin to simulate the Black rappers they enjoy listening to by picking up mannerism, colloquialisms and Black vernacular:

"I forgot I was white," explains free-style rapper Automattic during a hip-hop Battle on the Indiana University campus. He says this after his lame competitor rhymes that the white and pretty clean-cut Automattic can’t be an emcee because he's white and so he should "stop acting like he's black"—as though busting out some free-associative poetry is all it takes to be a black person, or that good rhythm is exclusively a black thing.

This is just one of the scenes in the new educational doc Blacking Up: Hip Hop's Remix of Race and Identity, which tries to figure out what attracts white rappers to hip-hop: admiration or something uglier? The answer, it turns out, depends on the person.

In the nearly hourlong film, director Robert Clift has hip-hop heavyweights like Public Enemy's Chuck D, Aesop Rock, Sage Francis, M1 from Dead Prez, Power from Wu-Tang Clan—along with some of Indiana’s white hip-hop performers—weigh in on the motives behind the white appropriation of black culture, labels like "wiggers," and charges of minstrelsy. Clift, who is white and a big hip-hop fan, is on a quest to discover whether white rappers "are transcending race" or just mimicking "a degrading idea of what it means to be black" in the same vein as the minstrel scenes of Al Jolson’s day.

White people who listen to rap might forget they are white, but the story from Florida proves one thing: Black people never, ever do.

Some people just Can't Hardly Wait for their own demise, can they?

It's no longer white boy day in Black Run America (BRA).

Death Sentence for Kyser Miree in Mobile: The Story You’ll Only Find Here

Death Sentence is a 2008 Kevin Bacon film that deals with the ritualistic murder of his son by a multi-racial gang preparing to initiate a new recruit. This type of event happens all the time in real-life, but these gangs have much less passion and enthusiasm for diversity as movies and television hint.

Why in Chicago today, 9 random people were shot at a bus stop:

Nine people were shot at a bus station in the south side of Chicago Monday, police said.

All but one of them suffered non-life threatening injuries. The ninth person was seriously hurt, police said.

The shooting took place in the 7900 block of South Western Avenue and appears to be gang-related, officials said.

Police were interviewing witnesses and put out a call for any videos that may have captured the shooting.

A death sentence is ostensibly what recent college graduate Kyser Miree had when he moved to Mobile, Alabama to take an engineering position:

Four suspects charged with capital murder in the death of Christopher Kyser Miree are scheduled to be in court today for bail hearings.

Jamal Breon Lang, 20; Michael Jerome Lee, 19; Bo Taylor, 18; and Earnest Teryl Wiggins, 19 will appear before Mobile County District Judge George Hardesty.

Miree, 23, was found shot in the head April 16 at 4 Macy Place, the residence he shared with a co-worker.

"We are going to request the court give them no bonds in light of the seriousness of the charge and the crime," Mobile County District Attorney John Tyson Jr. said Monday. Since juvenile records are sealed, Tyson said he could not discuss whether any of the suspects had been convicted of prior offenses in juvenile court.

The four were "riding around looking for people to rob" that night, Mobile Police Chief Micheal T. Williams said at a news conference Monday. "And Kyser Miree was one of the victims of their revelry."

Lang and Lee were arrested by police early Sunday, while Taylor turned himself in Sunday night. Wiggins surrendered to police Monday morning.

All four suspects remained in Mobile County Metro Jail. A capital murder charge carries a possible death sentence.

A graduate of Vanderbilt University, Miree was an engineer who worked for the Chevron Corp. refinery in Pascagoula.

Williams refused to say what type of weapon was used in the killing, what was taken from Miree or his home or whether his killing could be related the death of Zoa White.

The body of the 69-year-old White was found June 28 inside her Spring Hill Avenue home. White died of "blunt force trauma to the head," according to police.

Her house was about a mile from the Macy Place home where Miree was killed. No one has been charged in that case.

Tyson said he does not believe the death of White and Miree are connected.

Williams said police are still working to evaluate whether anyone will get the reward that was offered in the Miree case. Authorities received an anonymous tip that led to the arrests, Tyson said Sunday.

The victim's family offered $50,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for his death. Tyson said he talked with Williams on Monday about the reward money.

"We'll have to look at those terms and evaluate whether one or more persons are entitled to it," Tyson said.

The Miree case "caused a lot of problems with people being uneasy in their homes," the chief said Monday.

Williams praised his police officers for diligently pursuing the case and doing "a lot of good police work."

The chief added: "These guys were out there every day, running down tips."

Ask yourself why true vigilante movies can’t be made in Hollywood, and the name Kyser Miree supplies ample evidence as to why these films are incapable of being produced. Perhaps the Black residents of Mobile got tired of looking for the elusive Leprechaun and decided to go looking for money from the next best source instead of an imaginary one.

It took months to solve this case, ostensibly because no one would snitch. Instead, these criminals roamed Mobile freely.

For every James Byrd story - which serves as the ultimate fodder to foster white guilt among those who hear about or read this woeful tale - hundreds of stories such as Miree's murder go unreported on the national scale, never having the opportunity to create the same Black guilt amongst those who had nothing to do with the heinous murders.

Only white people must embrace the burden of one crime by a member of their race, a stigma that the entire racial group must carry as evidence of their alleged and continual racism.

In 2010, to continually incubate and instill white guilt, the media hypes stories of decades old murderers finally coming to justice. No, the killers of today no longer wear hoods but in fact come from the hood.

What's worse, most people know this and flee to Whitopia's in a vain attempt to escape reality - even if only temporarily. For the truth is, there is no escaping reality anymore.

It is after all, a Black World Now. Christopher Kernich learned this the same way Miree did. TBW has come to Mobile.

Where will it strike next?

WKRG.com News

#87. The Great Books

Enter any school room in America where English is the primary subject and chances are you will happen upon a discussion of some great book or work of literary merit. Crusading White Pedagogues eagerly discuss the qualities and virtues of a given tome that has been deemed worthy of reading and further analysis is required to understand the myriad complexities the author is trying to convey.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Cooper, Melville, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Twain, Hawthorne and numerous other long-dead individuals routinely speak to current students through the medium of their novel (here is a list of the top novels that the AP Test has mentioned in testing since 1971).

By reading great books, students enter worlds foreign to them and engage in intimate –albeit one-sided – conversations with people whose fictional lives are still celebrated centuries after their story was first told.

Black students have long been forced to read so-called great books penned by dead-white males who knew precious little about the Black experience in America, which can explain the dismal scores that they achieve on AP Tests, when compared to other students.

Disingenuous White Liberals lament the ratio of great books that were penned, created and written by white authors, knowing instinctively that for every Richard Wright or Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison or Richard Wright novel, countless books exist by obscure authors that maintain greater literary merit but lack the one ingredient necessary to be labeled a great book by today’s standards – Black skin.

Things Fall Apart is a novel regarded as a classic, a great book written by an African author depicting life in a traditional African village. Taught, read and discussed in school rooms across the nation, Black people never realize the absurdity of this novel being deemed the highest achievement of authentic Africa literature.

All Black literature that has been celebrated as great and worthy of commending can be distilled as a celebration of Blackness in the face of overwhelming, crushing and soul-destroying whiteness. No more, no less. The one constant theme that unifies these writers in the great Diaspora of Black writers is the persistent reliance on race and racism to anchor their stories in the safe literary waters of Blackness, never attempting to write about subjects outside the confines of that particular safety net.

Though the fine arts have been conspicuously devoid of Black participation and influence, DWL literary critics heaping praise and reverence upon Black authors who revel in their Blackness throughout their entire literary output is commonplace.

The continued reliance on the piteous few Black authors who must carry the entire load for all Black writers is a burden not even Apollo would dare carry. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Native Son, Invisible Man can only be trotted out for so long as examples of Black literary accomplishments, when entire sections of bookstores are devoted to African-American literature. Surely some novel that rests on those dusty shelves deserves to be cracked open and explored in earnest, offering a well-needed respite for Ralph Ellison:

As the author of books on black history and black culture, I was disappointed but not surprised. To see a working-class 30-ish black woman with a book these days is almost always to find her reading a selection from the fastest-growing segment of African-American letters, a genre called "ghetto lit" or "gangster lit."

The best that can be said about these books is that they are an authentic literary product of 21st-century black America. Black women are much bigger readers than black men, and gangster lit dominates the best-seller list in Essence Magazine, which calculates rankings using sales at black-owned bookstores nationwide. Recent titles shout out to the hard, fast lifestyle: "Bad Girlz 4 Life," "Still Hood" and "From the Streets to the Sheets." Some of the most prominent authors include Vickie Stringer, who wrote "Let That Be the Reason," a semi-autobiographical work, while the future ghetto-lit publisher was doing seven years for drug trafficking; and Nikki Turner, who wrote "A Hustler's Wife" and "Death Before Dishonor" (co-authored with hip-hop star 50 Cent).

Well, perhaps not. Black literature that is celebrated must remain as the bedrock of all “great” Black literature, because the bile that follows in the rich Black literary tradition is barely worth publishing at all, since it brings to light the true state of Black America:

Mainstream publishing houses contort themselves to acquire books that glorify wanton sex, drugs and crime. This fiction, known as street-lit or hip-hop fiction, most often reinforces the stereotypical trademarks African Americans have fought hard to overcome. And while we are all the descendants of those great literary pioneers who first gave a voice to the African American experience, and one certainly could not exist without the other, somewhere down the line the balance was thrown off and the scales tipped in favor of a genre that glorifies street life and denigrates a cultural institution that took hundreds of years to construct.

Does a literary ghetto deny Black authors opportunities for success and a large following, or is it the opposite? Like directors in Hollywood and screenwriters who devise the shows we watch, do so few talented Black writers exist that the only way to maintain any illusion of literary equality is to promote the same boring stories of oppression and books that revel in Blackness?

All of the so-called great books, penned by white people, will soon be banished from circulation because they fail to reveal in the proper level of Blackness and wallow in an acceptable amount of white guilt.

Stuff Black People Don’t Like includes the great books. Too few have been penned by Black authors and many of the celebrated authors wrote books that could be deemed racist and utilize unacceptable quantities of Blackness, which explains the high-rates of Black illiteracy that are found throughout the entire country.

Undeniably, Black people would rather urinate on the great books then read them. Things Fall Apart indeed.

A Statement of Intentions : Facing the Future

A number of books have come out recently dealing with future prognostications. Will the 21^st century be the “Chinese Century”? Perhaps the century India rises? Some books project that life in 2050 America will resemble a nirvana, peace in every state and county and a renewed vigor of the spirit and determination that once powered the United States in centuries past.

I’m not a pessimist, but few who pay attention to the financial news as it relates to the United States can feel positive about the future of the nation if present trends continue unabated.

Steady growth continues only in the government sectors, while the private sector is seeing jobs wither away at historic rates without any hope of ever returning. Continued mass immigration into this nation provides cheap, disposable labor that those unfortunate enough to compete with for employment opportunities find impossible given the hourly wage that illegal aliens are willing to work so that they too can have a slice of the American dream.

The continued existence of Black Run America (BRA) hampers all those who are unacceptably white and thus, ineligible for hiring or enrollment in elite institutions of higher learning.

The offensive nature of whiteness will ultimately be stomped out as diversity initiatives and mandates have been incorporated into every college, university and corporation in the United States, in an all-out – total – war on Pre-Obama America.

It is fitting that the descendants of people who made this nation the envy of the world, a country that people from every Third World land strive to immigrate to at the risk of death, march willingly into a perpetual state of servility refusing to acknowledge what made this nation that proverbial ‘shining city on a hill’ in the first place.

Why is that people choose to live in places deemed “Whitopia’s” (areas that the US News and World Report deem the best places to live in America) and flee places like Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, Birmingham, Oakland and Tulsa?

In 21^st century America, the one unforgivable sin is to be white, an unpardonable crime and act of treason against the rising order, a biological transgression against a world that has deemed such a genetic deformity to be the greatest mockery against humanity that can occur.

Yet it is lands inhabited by these petulant, pusillanimous people – many Disingenuous White Liberals - that the colored world flocks to, risking their lives in the process of receiving a “better” life at the hands of pasty patsies who welcome them into their nation, signing a Faustian Pact for temporary menial laborers but a long-term demographic time bomb.

Worse, Black people do little to protest the deluge of immigrants pouring into this nation, never realizing the threat they pose to the long-term existence and health of Black Run America.

Already Black people are demographically third behind Hispanics and white people in total population in these United States. At some point the Rainbow Coalition that unites Black and Brown against the alleged oppressor will crumble.

Oddly, in the 21^st century America, the best minds educated at the top universities are expected to join Teach for America and become Crusading White Pedagogues. Instead of working on innovations in business, science, mathematics and technology, their task for the future is to impart as much knowledge on those who continually and habitually perform poorly on standardized tests (and virtually every other test imaginable and devised to measure and quantify cognitive ability).

Black students who perform poorly on these tests are still highly sought after by elite colleges, at the expense of disposable white students who might have outperformed that individual in all areas but the one that truly matters.

Untold trillions have been spent on scholastic programs and projects to improve the intellectual aptitudes of Black people and these large-scale efforts have consistently failed without any discernible improvements to justify sustained, prolonged investments.

The Bill Gates Scholarship, unavailable to white students who have been deemed unfit to receive such an illustrious honor due to their recurrent, ceaseless burden of incessant privilege, and the foundation that shares his name have embarked on a crusade to save America’s schools. Recently profiled in Businessweek, the entire operation was deemed ineffective.

All failures that blight the Black community originate from one source, white people. If a white person cannot be identified as the culprit for pervasive Black failure a suitable replacement can be found.

Indeed, our friends in Tulsa, Oklahoma blame the high rates of crime and murder committed largely in the confines of a particular portion of the city where one primary segment of the citizenry resides on heat waves. Crime, mayhem and murder – like the Reaper – knows no season but dispenses meaningless and gratuitous cruelty without regard for time nor dying people at The Chicken Hut.

Someone sent me an email recently asking what the purpose of this website is and why it is even necessary? The answer is simple: Go back and read every entry and you’ll find each littered with links to stories from across the United States that paint an accurate picture of life in 2010 America.

What is the point of this diatribe? Well, watching the under-appreciated 2002 film The Time Machine, the thought of what the 21^st century has in store for America crossed my mind. If trends continue, it could simply be the one a certain 1997 comedy on HBO foretold.

On the same day that I viewed the Guy Pearce film, the following article from Men’s Fitness serendipitously found its way into view:

Why? McConaughey put it pretty well: "Cynics love to put their finger on disease before they put it on health. It's the easy way to go. Play the blame game: 'I got screwed, that should've been mine.' They're all dead-end answers. For me, 'Just keep livin',' as a creed and a compass, is about making the evolving choice, the forward-moving, life-giving choice."

If that quote made you wince, you probably have a healthy cynical streak. But I can say, as a guy lucky enough to interview upward of a hundred hypersuccessful people -- from billionaire CEOs and future Hall of Fame athletes to doctors and teachers you've never heard of -- that if successful people have one common trait, it's an utter lack of cynicism. The world owes them nothing. They go out and find what they need without asking for permission; they're driven, talented, and work through negatives by focusing on the positives. Being stupid, it took me years to figure this out, and being deeply cynical since high school, the moment was a pie in the face -- with a lead pie pan.

If you have read this website for some time, you might be of the opinion that a certain doom and gloom or pessimism is to be found in great abundance, accompanying each entry and that hope is but an emotion for fools or smart advertisers trying to sell you something.

Wrong. I am optimistic about the future. Though The Time Machine ends goofily and makes absolutely no sense, this one scene from the film is powerful – perhaps one of the most important glimpses into the unimaginable changes that were made between 1888 and the year 2000.

It is my hope that you begin to consider SBPDL as a chronicle of life in one particular epoch of time – though some might consider it a difficult time – that is coming to a fitting and stunning conclusion.

If you are just beginning the journey and have recently discovered this website, I encourage you to go back to the beginning, starting with the first entry. You will discover an odyssey of stories that would shock Odysseus himself and have ample evidence at your disposal that should cause deep thought and contemplation.

The world we live in 2010 is much different than the one that existed in May of 2009 when this website became operational. You will have a guide in the archives that shows exactly why Mein Obama’s approval rating is dropping and exactly why the power of BRA is fading with each passing day.

Indeed, an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal has been published that attacks one of the two foundational myths that helps maintain BRA’s supremacy. Penned by a Democratic US Senator, this op-ed equates to the finding of the Rosetta Stone, an unlocking of a world to millions that previously existed but no one knew the code to unravel it.

The code of course being courage, courage to speak about and the audacity to state boldly what is transpiring in 21^st century America.

It will take courage to face the future, because so much seems to be out of our hands. We can’t change the past and for many, the present seems bleak, a perpetual cycle of darkest nights that refuses to allow good news to filter in.

Cynicism and courage are incompatible, enemies that negate action and necessitate sterility.

The future? Well, that remains unwritten. Though an overabundance of evidence can be found to dissuade you from maintaining hope, courage is the one formidable ally that you can always rely on.

This website did predict that the World Cup in South Africa would be a chaotic experience, though a heroic utilization of resources and outside riches insulated that embattled nation for one magical month.

Now, South Africa’s demise is accelerating, though the TV cameras have left after DWL’s engaged in self-congratulatory celebration over a momentary job well-done.

Courage. That’s all that has ever mattered. So keep enjoying SBPDL, and thanks to those who have donated. It means a lot to know that people I may never meet appreciate the work that has gone into this blog.

It is nothing more than a chronicle of life under BRA – a reality that more and more people wake up to everyday. In closing, we can’t jump into a time machine and see the future and know exactly what is going to transpire.

No book can predict with absolutely certainty that the 21^st century will belong to the Chinese, India, perhaps the European Union or maybe herald some other-worldly directional shift in Africa’s well-being.

Fretting about what you cannot change only hastens your decline, inducing a state of psychological paralysis, leaving you cynical. Courage is the only antidote.

If you can maintain that courage, imagine what you’ll know tomorrow. The future is coming and it's time to face it without cynicism.

Expansion Plans Ready - A Modest Proposal

The long-awaited expansion at SBPDL is about to commence. However, to accomplish this task a favor must be asked of readers.

Notice in the upper left-hand corner of this website a "donate" button appears. If you have enjoyed this website for the roughly 400 days it has been online, consider making a donation to help facilitate this expansion.

The sole reason donations are asked for at this time is to help pay for a professional web-designer. I truly love doing this blog and only desire to finally expand for maximum exposure.

In the process of being online, both Facebook and Google have taken extraordinary measures to censor this website. Now, the time is finally right to strike back with the unveiling of a professionally designed website.

It might come as a shock to many reading, but the entire operation of SBPDL is a one-person endeavor (save a heroic individual who has volunteered to edit many of the posts) and it is believed that much more can be accomplished with the expanded website.

So, if you have enjoyed reading this website consider making a donation to help off-set the costs of the expansion. This website was created to educate the world about Black people in the United States of America and this task will continue as the pillars that hold aloft Black Run America (BRA) shake with each passing day.

Your donation will be appreciated and will be put to good use. If you have been reading this website for sometime, then you have a vested interest in its continued existence and a donation should be considered an investment in SBPDL's growth.

It's not like we are asking for $1 million dollars, just whatever donation you can give to help off-set the costs that will accompany the move to a new design (which will include a weekly podcast and yes, a Youtube news-type show) and vastly improved website.

Thank you for your continued reading of SBPDL and thank you for any donation you can give.

You have seen what can be accomplished by one person who invests a little bit of time into a website, without asking for donations in the process of building that distinct brand.

Now, imagine what your donation can help create.

#61. Turner Classic Movies

Pre-Obama America (POA) is gone, dead for the ages. Acting as celluloid mausoleums interning and memorializing a long dead nation, movies depict this era that has passed into the pages of history, haunting all those who view the images and forever taunting them with a glimpse of stability and an uncompromising belief that tomorrow would be better than the next day.

In Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner’s character Ray has the chance to play catch with his father one last time – his ghost when he was in his early 20s - and comments to his wife at the sight of his dad:

“Look at him. I only remember him as an old man, when he was beaten down by life. He has his whole life before him and I’m not even a glimmer in his eye.”

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is a channel devoted to showcasing the glories of Pre-Obama America, as chronicled in film. Timeless classics that still resonate with viewers who watch them today (look over the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Films ever made and notice this startling truth – that POA is immortalized in motion pictures and they will forever plague those who bemoan that era for wanton cruelty) realize all that has been lost in the span of a few generations by the vivid reminder that John Wayne, Cary Grant and James Stewart provide.

Black people view TCM and wonder with amusement and bewildered looks of incredulity at the virtual whiteout that they see depicted in the films. In the dark days of POA, directors and casting agents weren’t handcuffed with filling quotas and diversity mandates (comic book movies had yet to made, so no Nordic Gods could be depicted with melanin-enriched skin) and Hollywood was in the business of making movies that appealed to the masses and reflected the morals of a nation comprised of 90 percent of the same racial group.

TCM rated the 15 most influential films of all-time and one glaring similarity exists between every film: the lack of Black faces – save Gone With the Wind that depicted Black people in a light comparable to Song of the South – that one will see in each movie:

The channel, created by Ted Turner as part of his Turner Broadcasting System, began broadcasting on April 14, 1994. The date was chosen for its significance as "the exact centennial anniversary of the first public movie showing in New York City." The very first movie ever screened on TCM was the 1939 classic epic Gone With The Wind, exactly what its sister station, TNT, had aired as its debut program six years before.

At the time of its launch, TCM competed against AMC (at the time, called American Movie Classics), which had a virtually identical format to TCM as both cable channels ran mostly pre-1970 films; though by 2002, AMC had reformatted itself to feature films from all eras, leaving TCM as the only cable movie channel devoted entirely to classic films.

Before the creation of TCM, quite a few titles from its vast library of movies were broadcast — with commercial interruptions — on Turner's TNT channel, along with Turner's controversial colorized versions of black-and-white classics such as The Maltese Falcon.

Unlike AMC, Turner Classic Movies is essentially commercial-free (advertising only TCM products, promos for specific films scheduled to air on the channel in primetime typically using the film's original movie trailer as well as promos for special programming and featurettes about classic film actors and actresses, and only airing these advertisements in between features so as not to interrupt the film). TCM's content has also remained mostly uncut and uncolorized (depending upon the original content of movies, particularly movies rated by the MPAA after 1968). Because of the uncut and commercial-free nature of the channel, TCM is formatted similarly to a premium channel; as such, viewers might find that certain films, particularly those made from the 1960s onward, may feature nudity, sexual content, violence and strong profanity (though most films airing on TCM are devoid of such content as it mostly airs pre-1960 films, when content standards for films were more restrictive; films containing sexual content, violence and strong profanity, when scheduled, are typically aired on the channel only at night); the channel also features premium channel-style ratings bumpers seconds before a film starts (though films on TCM are rated using the TV Parental Guidelines as most movies aired were made before the MPAA ratings system was established) instead of displaying a rating icon on-screen at the very start of a movie.

An unbridled optimism can be found in the movies that glorify this generation – though at the time of production, no one involved with the making of any of these movies could understand the severity of the crimes they would be committing when viewed by future generations who live after the fall of POA – and it is infectious when viewed for the first time.

Actors and directors who made films such as How the West was Won could scarcely comprehend the egregiousness of their actions, when viewed by later generations that came to believe that Manifest Destiny was an idea conjured by insidious pale faces intent on the genocide of peaceful tribes roaming the land freely.

Why do these people not suffer from the uncontrollable white guilt that is found so readily in movies as of late and taught with earnest enthusiasm by Crusading White Pedagogues in schools across the nation?

There is something frightening about watching movies on TCM and realizing that entire generations of men and women once lived in a world where the tenets of Black Run America (BRA) had no power, no influence and no discernible impact on the lives of those captured on camera for those to remember for as long as devices exist that playback ageless memories on film.

Turner Classic Movies represents a window into a past that few could ever believe existed, were it not for films starring such men such as Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and Charles Bronson among others.

No, these films remain vestiges of a time that taunt us with simplicity, reminders of a greatest generation that dies daily and would rather cling to memories of a past then remain agitated by glimpses of a horrific future broadcast on the nightly news.

And that, is the most potent weapon that Disingenuous White Liberals and those who find employment and promotion thanks to BRA fear. Memory, remembrance of things past and that could be once again.

You see, Turner Classic Movies show films that promote a spirit that those in power now view as degenerate and they hope, ethereal. If not, these movies will be banned and in many cases permanently destroyed. TCM – which has gone to great lengths to restore many films – must be removed from cable and digital broadcasts so that the vile it distributes can be forever expunged and never to shown again.

Stuff Black People Don’t Like includes Turner Classic Movies, a channel devoted to lionizing Pre-Obama America and exalting it to heights that cause those in power to pause, albeit momentarily. Even DWL’s look at the actors in these films with a mixture of admiration and trepidation, recalling the time they first viewed the film and the emotions that came with it, yet realizing that the world in the 21st century resembles Falling Down more than it does Singing in the Rain.

TCM must be banned and the films shown on the channel removed from circulation and private homes immediately. These living memories of Pre-Obama America are an abomination for they have the ability to entertain, induce laughter and tears and worse, inspire.

When the Soviet Union dissolved, Russians began to display Christian iconography long deemed seditious and banned by the ruling Bolsheviks, remnants of a defeated people and a false religion that Communism replaced.

Risking death if these items were unearthed by commissar , these Russians had hidden crosses and religious pictures as reminders of what they once had and it is time that movies from Pre-Obama America be treated as subversive and treasonable material as well.

TCM is disloyal and a source of rebellious information that must be removed from circulation, for the memories of all that has been lost cannot be transmitted to a viewing public who are beginning to see with greater clarity than ever before.