Two From the Baytown Sun

In celebration of my upcoming holiday return to my home town (Highlands), here are two impecibly combined quotes from the Baytown Sun website's front page today:

Civic leader honored for service to Baytown

The distinguished guests – state and local elected officials and leaders of the Baytown community – rose to their feet Tuesday night to salute the 2007 Exxon Mobil Refiner of the Year, and everyone agreed no one was more deserving than Doug Huddle.

[...]

Huddle [...] said Exxon Mobil taught him what it meant to be a volunteer.

and

Nooses get noticed

[...] two nooses were found hanging from scaffolding at the Exxon Mobil refinery.

(My emphasis), with all due respect to Doug Huddle, this was just too funny of a coincidence not to point out, given Baytown's reputation as a generally bigoted city.

It's become a joke in itself to have "sensitivity training" meetings at the workplace. I've overheard sarcastic remarks about such meetings at the power plant I used to work at (and will probably work at again) in Pasadena, TX. A common phrase used is "I'm okay-you're okay PC bullshit." Political correctness has become kind of an offensive term in itself, yet it's clear that some men in the professional realm do need schooling in racial sensitivity, or maybe just an ass-kicking for being racist assholes.

I know for sure that there are plenty of white people in Baytown who just do not care about racism.

"Jena justice is Louisiana justice, which is United States justice"

From the Texas Observer:

Twenty minutes later, the officer calls James and me to her. He and I trade one last look, eyebrows up, and smile at each other. The officer hands me a ticket and tells me I am free to go. Then she grabs James and handcuffs him. “You have a parking ticket you haven’t paid, and there is a warrant for you because of it,” she tells him, and begins to recite his rights.

“No!” I tell her before I can think. “Ma’am, no, you can’t do that. He didn’t do anything. He has a 3-week-old baby in the car.”

“The judge wants to see you,” the cop tells James. “That’s all I know. So you are going to go to jail.”

clickhereforallofit

I've been thinking and talking about racism lately. I've posted some videos of myself doing so on YouTube. The titles are "White People: you're not victims of racism!" parts 1 and 2. They got immediate responses in their comment sections, and they're still snowballing.

Many white Americans truely believe minorities receive preferential treatment in this country. I can't put into words how backwards that is, it's just not true. Some call affirmative action "reverse racism," they think it only works for non-whites. They seem to think that anything done on behalf of another ethnic group is some kind of blow to their own. They don't see our government for what it is and what's it's been since our country's birth: mostly white. They can't see that white people are still in enormous positions of power.

I don't know how else to convince them, other than to talk about it, that racism is still a problem today and it still affects blacks the most.

Many naysayers remind me that white immigrants were treated poorly when they came to America, but they "worked hard," and "didn't bitch about it," and "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps," and so on. They ignore the fact that white immigrants were accepted nearly instantly compared to how long it took for blacks to gain ANYTHING in America.

Further, there are still Italian and Irish stereotypes, to be sure, but racism against whites just doesn't happen, and if it does, it doesn't come from the government or people with authority. THAT'S the difference, and it's important. It usually comes from uneducated minorities who's only experiences with whites have involved getting screwed over. Can you blame them? And how horrible is it to be called a "cracker" or a "honkey" or "white boy"? It's sure never gotten me into an "I'm a victim!" tizzy, and it never will.