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sad, rest in peace Joe Cocker.....
The Healing Benefits of CINNAMON & HONEY: update
Love my oatmeal, cinnamon, & honey.....
Since the initial posting of the Cinnamon and Honey article, it has become one of the most popular pieces on the whole website. Besides some of the great testimonials I have received about this simple healing formula there are some additional considerations that have been brought to my attention. Since I have had so many hits and some very important comments I decided to take these helpful suggestions and clarification in order to bring people more update and accurate information. First before you start taking this, please note that all Cinnamon is not the same. There are two types: Ceylon Cinnamon and Cassian Cinnamon. Cassian has much higher levels of a compound called Coumarin, which can be toxic to your liver in large prolong doses, please see specifications below. If you are taking Cinnamon daily you should take Ceylon Cinnamon which has low levels of Coumarin and won't damage your liver.
As far as honey, it is best to get raw never been heated honey. You can find some great products at your local health food store. But the big chain supermarkets honey have none of the nutritional value you can get with natural raw. But even raw honey is very high in natural sugar and should be used in moderation. that is the key to this formula and health in general. The best strategy is to take a rest of one week after six weeks of use to give your body a rest... and you can come back to the formula with renewed strength.
Here are some other update: where it says spoonful, it is most logical to use teaspoon sizes not table spoon.
And it is best not to boil honey, it can lose it valuable enzymatic power. Where it says boil, it means pour boiling water over honey, it does not mean boil the honey/
Do not boil, but it's ok to pour boiling water over honey. I hope this
One additional confession: It is true that most of the original posting was mostly taken from a the Weekly World News, January 17 1995. But just because a lot of what is found in that paper can be considered confabulation, this particular piece seemed to have merit and the honey and cinnamon combination as a natural remedy can be found in many other places as a well proven remedy. - Alan Steinfeld of New Realities
Here is the updated article:
Folk remedies have been around a long time for a very good reason-- they work!
Here is another for the folks: CINNAMON & HONEY
Honey is the only food on the planet that will not spoil or rot. It will do what some call turning to sugar. Never boil honey or put it in a microwave. To do so will kill the enzymes in the honey. Make sure your honey is untreated, unprocessed and not heated. This will have the greatest benefit. Caution honey is a form of sugar so too much honey of any kind is not good for the body. But a little bit will help some of the following conditions.
The Cinnamon should be organic. Chinese medicine says it is warming and nourishing for the Kidneys.
Weekly World News, a magazine in Canada has given the following list of diseases that can be cured by honey and cinnamon as researched by western scientists:
ARTHRITIS: Arthritis patients may take daily, morning and night, one cup of hot water with two spoons of honey and one small teaspoon of cinnamon powder. If taken regularly even chronic arthritis can be cured. In a recent research conducted at the Copenhagen University , it was found that when the doctors treated their patients with a mixture of one tablespoon Honey and half teaspoon Cinnamon powder before breakfast, they found that within a week, out of the 200 people so treated, practically 73 patients were totally relieved of pain, and within a month, mostly all the patients who could not walk or move around because of arthritis started walking without pain.
BLADDER INFECTIONS: Take two tablespoons of cinnamon powder and one teaspoon of honey in a glass of lukewarm water and drink it. It destroys the germs in the bladder.
CHOLESTEROL: Two tablespoons of honey and three teaspoons of Cinnamon Powder mixed in 16 ounces of tea water, given to a cholesterol patient, was found to reduce the level of cholesterol in the blood by 10 percent within two hours. As mentioned for arthritic patients, if taken three times a day, any chronic cholesterol is cured. According to information received in the said Journal, pure honey taken with food daily relieves complaints of cholesterol.
COLDS: Those suffering from common or severe colds should take one tablespoon lukewarm honey with 1/4 spoon cinnamon powder daily for three days. This process will cure most chronic cough, cold, and clear the sinuses. To make it lukewarm, place it in a small jar and let it set in warm water for awhile.
HEART DISEASES: Make a paste of honey and cinnamon powder, apply on bread, instead of jelly and jam, and eat it regularly for breakfast. It reduces the cholesterol in the arteries and saves the patient from heart attack.
Regular use of the above process relieves loss of breath and strengthens the heart beat. In America and Canada, various nursing homes have treated patients successfully and have found that as you age, the arteries and veins lose their flexibility and get clogged; honey and cinnamon revitalize the arteries and veins.
UPSET STOMACH: Honey taken with cinnamon powder cures stomach ache and also clears stomach ulcers from the root.
GAS: According to the studies done in India and Japan , it is revealed that if Honey is taken with cinnamon powder the stomach is relieved of gas.
IMMUNE SYSTEM: Daily use of honey and cinnamon powder strengthens the immune system and protects the body from bacteria and viral attacks. Scientists have found that honey has various vitamins and iron in large amounts. Constant use of Honey strengthens the white blood corpuscles to fight bacterial and viral diseases.
INDIGESTION: Cinnamon powder sprinkled on two tablespoons of honey taken before food relieves acidity and digests the heaviest of meals.
INFLUENZA – FLU: A scientist in Spain has proved that honey contains a natural ' Ingredient' which kills the influenza germs and saves the patient from flu.
LONGEVITY: Tea made with honey and cinnamon powder, when taken regularly, arrests the ravages of old age. Take four spoons of honey, one spoon of cinnamon powder, and three cups of water and boil to make like tea. Drink 1/4 cup, three to four times a day. It keeps the skin fresh and soft and arrests old age. Life spans also increase and even a 100 year old might start performing the chores of a 20-year-old.
PIMPLES: Three tablespoons of honey and one teaspoon of cinnamon powder paste. Apply this paste on the pimples before sleeping and wash it next morning with warm water. If done daily for two weeks, it removes pimples from the root.
WEIGHT LOSS: Daily in the morning one half hour before breakfast on an empty stomach, and at night before sleeping, drink honey and cinnamon powder boiled in one cup of water. If taken regularly, it reduces the weight of even the most obese person. Also, drinking this mixture regularly does not allow the fat to accumulate in the body even though the person may eat a high calorie diet.
SKIN INFECTIONS: Applying honey and cinnamon powder in equal parts on the affected parts cures eczema, ringworm and all types of skin infections.
FATIGUE: Recent studies have shown that the sugar content of honey is more helpful rather than being detrimental to the strength of the body. Senior citizens, who take honey and cinnamon powder in equal parts, are more alert and flexible. Dr. Milton, who has done research, says that a half tablespoon of honey taken in a glass of water and sprinkled with cinnamon powder, taken daily after brushing and in the afternoon at about 3:00 P.M. when the vitality of the body starts to decrease, increases the vitality of the body within a week.
CANCER: Research in Japan and Australia has revealed that advanced cancer of the stomach and bones have been cured successfully. Patients suffering from these kinds of cancer should daily take one tablespoon of honey with one teaspoon of cinnamon powder for one month three times a day.
BAD BREATH: People in South America first thing in the morning, gargle with one teaspoon of honey and cinnamon powder mixed in hot water, so their breath stays fresh throughout the day.
HEARING LOSS: Daily morning and night honey and cinnamon powder, taken in equal parts helps restore hearing.
CONCLUSION:
It is good to take some sort of mixture of cinnamon and honey daily! ?
How to Differentiate Between Ceylon and Cassia Cinnamon
From: http://www.peashealth.com/fake-and-real-cinnamons/
You need to pay attention to a very important fact that all cinnamon is no good. Most people do not know it. There is a lot of discussion on the internet on topics like benefits, uses, remedies etc of cinnamon. There is either no or little information about the fact that all cinnamon is not good. There is fake and real, good and bad, toxic and non-toxic! In this article, I have explained all about this and how to choose the right one.
Cassia Cinnamon
This is called cassia, Chinese or Saigon cinnamon. Some people also call it fake cinnamon. It is produced in countries such as Vietnam, China and Indonesia. It is very hot and by chewing a piece you can feel the pungent taste sizzle and flame in your mouth. It shares some of the characteristics with real cinnamon like being anti-microbial, anti-fungal, blood regulation etc. The real problem, however, with the fake cinnamon is that it has a high content of coumarin; in fact, nearly 1200 times higher than found in the real herb. Taking large amount of coumarin is highly toxic and a prolong use may pose several serious health damages.
According to the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) in Germany, coumarin can damage liver and kidneys if taken for longer periods. In case of sensitive individuals, only a small amount can cause damage.
BfR further advises that cassia cinnamon contains high levels of coumarin and should not, therefore, be eaten.
Cassia Cinnamon is a lot cheaper than the real or Ceylon variety. Most cinnamon sold in the supermarket is the Chinese or Cassia variety.
Ceylon Cinnamon
This is also called real, sweet or good cinnamon. It is produced in Sri Lanka from the plant called Cinnamomum Zeylanicum. It is light brown in color and thin and soft in appearance. The sticks are filled like a cigar with several folded layers. The amount of coumarin content is only 0.0004% against 5 % found in Cinnamomum Cassia.
How to Distinguish Between the Two?
In case of ground cinnamon, it is very difficult to distinguish between the two unless you are an expert, especially at sniffing spices. Howler, there is no guarantee that the result will be one hundred percent accurate. However, in case of sticks, it is easier to differentiate between the two. The following table and pictures highlight some of the differences which shall help you to choose the correct type.
Ceylon Cinnamon Cassian Cinnamon
Soft texture, easily broken Hard texture Not easily broken
Soft and Sweet aromatic Pungent and very spicy flavor
Coumarin content 0.0004% Coumarin content 5%
Generally safe Toxic if taken in case of prolonged use
Expensive and not found everywhere A lot cheaper and found in supermarket
Native to Sri Lanka Native to China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia
Light brown in color Dark Brown or reddish in color
Soft in appearance Rough in appearance
Several folds of layer like a cigar only inward folded. Empty cavity
Most bottled or packaged ground cinnamon does not mention its type or origin. It is, therefore, difficult to ascertain its type and origin or the country or plant. The best course is to identify the sticks and make sure that you are buying the Ceylon variety. Once you get hold of the real “thing” , use your blender to crush it into powder.
Santa Baby! "Original Song 1953" Eartha Kitt!
I yust go nuts at Christmas - Yogi Yorgesson
not sure why but absolutely use to love these.
LOL, sounds like happy hour to me.. what a band
Anyone that has lost a loved one really should listen to this song. This really hits it on the head. Bless everyone this Christmas.
Mark Schultz - Different Kind of Christmas
week 16, BUF, thx
cap, will miss your eclectic music tastes and your banter, cya on the freebies
dbl
LOL he was a trip
SADAY NITE....LIVE 9 TA MIDNITE.....in my best wolfman jack voice.
fond memories of route 66 and the wolfman....
Classic! of one of my all time fave albums, "Hot Buttered Soul"
Lowell Fulson - Lonesome Christmas (Part 1 & 2) Swing Time Records
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Fulson
According to some sources, Fulson was born on a Choctaw reservation in Oklahoma. Fulson stated that he was of Cherokee ancestry through his father, but he also claimed Choctaw ancestry. At the age of eighteen, he moved to Ada, Oklahoma, and joined Alger "Texas" Alexander for a few months in 1940,[1] but later moved to California, forming a band which soon included a young Ray Charles and tenor saxophone player, Stanley Turrentine. He recorded for Swing Time Records in the 1940s, Chess Records (on the Checker label) in the 1950s, Kent Records in the 1960s, and Rounder Records (Bullseye) in the 1970s.1950
Murray, is that Ray on the piano???
Nice!
You know how I feel about PFC...thx for the share
http://www.cityofmadison.com/MAC/public/collOtisRedding.cfm
Murray? What is up with the water around Muscle Shoals..that's where these guys all hooked up.
https://twitter.com/StP_BrokenBones
I agree big time but I do like these guys a ton...
St Paul & The Broken Bones - Half The City - A Take Away Show
I read somewhere that if Al Green and Alabama Shakes had a baby it would be St. Paul & Broken Bones......
St Paul & The Broken Bones - I've Been Loving You (Otis Redding cover) - A Take Away Show
I know there is and will always be only one Otis but this guy deserves a listen
The Day Otis Redding Died: December 10, 1967, Lake Monona, Wis.
great stuff tree.....
Alabama Shakes - I Found You
damn I was worried, all those choices and not a one.....2 out of a couple K ain't bad.
Great idea but I probably would have been denied for a pre existing condition.
Thug Kills White Prosecutor and Wife in Texas
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/09/1350586/-Thug-Kills-White-Prosecutor-and-Wife-in-Texas
I remember that shitty feeling when I 1st realized that the court system is a farce and there is no justice, unless of if you know the right people or you can buy it.
NPR Music released our Tiny Desk Concert this past weekend. Follow the link below to watch Paul dance all over Bob Boilen's desk!
http://www.npr.org/event/music/368730106/st-paul-and-the-broken-bones-tiny-desk-concert
St. Paul & the Broken Bones - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)
St. Paul and The Broken Bones - Call Me
St Paul & The Broken Bones - I've Been Loving You (Otis Redding cover)
A little Christmas cheer for all my musica friends
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=873054112728853&set=vb.120324438001828&type=2&theater
I believe it's viewable even if your not on facebook
How about a little cheer J, these guys are very good......
Call the Cops
Baltimore please & thx
Thought I'd see all of his, hilarious, thx J
yes .. the history of racism in America should be in every school curriculum...
hear, hear, J!
Tim Wise Pens Brilliant Editorial on Ferguson: Most White Americans are ‘Completely Oblivious’
http://aattp.org/tim-wise-pens-brilliant-editorial-on-ferguson-most-white-americans-are-completely-oblivious/
If there’s any such entity as the Anti-Coulter, it’s Tim Wise. Wise has been one of the major voices in combating institutionalized racism in America for more than 20 years. Following his early college days in the Divestment Movement to end apartheid in South Africa, Wise has gone on to author six books on the subject, and has trained teachers, corporate employees and law enforcement members in overcoming the internalized racist views that they didn’t know they had.
In short: Tim Wise is not well-loved by conservatives. He’s also probably the nation’s foremost authority on race relations today; and in the wake of Ferguson, he says that most whites are simply oblivious to their own internalized racism. According to Wise, racist ideology has so thoroughly permeated American thought patterns and institutions that have shaped our fears, policies, even our dreams and aspirations that it’s simply become the framework through which we view the world.
This article was originally posted to AlterNet, and spells out pretty explicitly White America’s massive blind spot when it comes to the (often quite neutral or even benign) racism that we act on daily. We’re reprinting it in its entirety because…well…every word of it is absolutely true. Not that a bit of it will make a difference to some people. Some people will reject it out of hand, clinging to the framework they know lest it be shaken out from under them.
It’s a reflex.
I suppose there is no longer much point in debating the facts surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown. First, because Officer Darren Wilson has been cleared by a grand jury, and even the collective brilliance of a thousand bloggers pointing out the glaring inconsistencies in his version of events that August day won’t result in a different outcome. And second, because Wilson’s guilt or innocence was always somewhat secondary to the larger issue: namely, the issue of this gigantic national inkblot staring us in the face, and what we see when we look at it—and more to the point, why?
Because it is a kind of racial Rorschach (is it not?) into which each of these cases—not just Brown but all the others, from Trayvon Martin to Sean Bell to Patrick Dorismond to Aswan Watson and beyond—inevitably and without fail morph. That we see such different things when we look upon them must mean something. That so much of white America cannot see the shapes made out so clearly by most of black America cannot be a mere coincidence, nor is it likely an inherent defect in our vision. Rather, it is a socially-constructed astigmatism that blinds so many to the way in which black folks often experience law enforcement.
Not to overdo the medical metaphors, but as with those other cases noted above, so too in this one did a disturbing number of whites manifest something of a repetitive motion disorder—a reflex nearly as automatic as the one that leads so many police (or wanna-be police) to fire their weapons at black men in the first place. It is a reflex to rationalize the event, defend the shooter, trash the dead with blatantly racist rhetoric and imagery, and then deny that the incident or one’s own response to it had anything to do with race.
Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about sending around those phony pictures claimed to be of Mike Brown posing with a gun, or the one passed off as Darren Wilson in a hospital bed with his orbital socket blown out.
Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about how quickly those pictures were believed to be genuine by so many who distributed them on social media, even when they weren’t, and how difficult it is for some to discern the difference between one black man and another.
Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about how rapidly many bought the story that Wilson had been attacked and bloodied, even as video showed him calmly standing at the scene of the shooting without injury, and even as the preliminary report on the incident made no mention of any injuries to Officer Wilson, and even as Wilson apparently has a history of power-tripping belligerence towards those with whom he interacts, and a propensity to distort the details of those encounters as well.
Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about Cardinals fans taunting peaceful protesters who gathered outside a playoff game to raise the issue of Brown’s death, by calling them crackheads or telling them that it was only because of whites that blacks have any freedoms at all, or that they should “get jobs” or “pull up their pants,” or go back to Africa.
Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about sending money to Darren Wilson’s defense fund and then explaining one’s donation by saying what a service the officer had performed by removing a “savage” like Brown from the community, or by referring to Wilson’s actions as “animal control.”
Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about reaction to evidence of weed in Brown’s lifeless body, as with Trayvon’s before him, even though whites use drugs at the same rate as blacks, but rarely have that fact offered up as a reason for why we might deserve to be shot by police.
Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial behind the belief that the head of the Missouri Highway Patrol, brought in to calm tensions in Ferguson, was throwing up gang signs on camera, when actually, it was a hand sign for the black fraternity of which that officer is a member; and to deny that there is anything racial about one’s stunning ignorance as to the difference between those two things.
Reflex: To deny that there’s anything at all racial about the way that even black victims of violence—like Brown, like Trayvon Martin, and dozens of others—are often spoken of more judgmentally than even the most horrific of white perpetrators, the latter of whom are regularly referred to as having been nice, and quiet, and smart, and hardly the type to kill a dozen people, or cut them into little pieces, or eat their flesh after storing it in the freezer for several weeks.
And most of all, the reflex to deny that there is anything racial about the lens through which we typically view law enforcement; to deny that being white has shaped our understanding of policing and their actions in places like Ferguson, even as being white has had everything to do with those matters. Racial identity shapes the way we are treated by cops, and as such, shapes the way we are likely to view them. As a general rule, nothing we do will get us shot by law enforcement: not walking around in a big box store with semi-automatic weapons (though standing in one with an air rifle gets you killed if you’re black); not assaulting two officers, even in the St. Louis area, a mere five days after Mike Brown was killed; not pointing a loaded weapon at three officers and demanding that they—the police—”drop their fucking guns;” not committing mass murder in a movie theatre before finally being taken alive; not proceeding in the wake of that event to walk around the same town in which it happened carrying a shotgun; and not killing a cop so as to spark a “revolution,” and then leading others on a two month chase through the woods before being arrested with only a few scratches.
To white America, in the main, police are the folks who help get our cats out of the tree, or who take us on ride-arounds to show us how gosh-darned exciting it is to be a cop. We experience police most often as helpful, as protectors of our lives and property. But that is not the black experience by and large; and black people know this, however much we don’t. The history of law enforcement in America, with regard to black folks, has been one of unremitting oppression. That is neither hyperbole nor opinion, but incontrovertible fact. From slave patrols to overseers to the Black Codes to lynching, it is a fact. From dozens of white-on-black riots that marked the first half of the 20th century (in which cops participated actively) to Watts to Rodney King to Abner Louima to Amadou Diallo to the railroading of the Central Park 5, it is a fact. From the New Orleans Police Department’s killings of Adolph Archie to Henry Glover to the Danziger Bridge shootings there in the wake of Katrina to stop-and-frisk in places like New York, it’s a fact. And the fact that white people don’t know this history, have never been required to learn it, and can be considered even remotely informed citizens without knowing it, explains a lot about what’s wrong with America. Black people have to learn everything about white people just to stay alive. They especially and quite obviously have to know what scares us, what triggers the reptilian part of our brains and convinces us that they intend to do us harm. Meanwhile, we need know nothing whatsoever about them. We don’t have to know their history, their experiences, their hopes and dreams, or their fears. And we can go right on being oblivious to all that without consequence. It won’t be on the test, so to speak.
We can remain ignorant to the ubiquity of police misconduct, thinking it the paranoid fever dream of irrational “race-card” playing peoples of color, just like we did after the O.J. Simpson verdict. When most of black America responded to that verdict with cathartic relief—not because they necessarily thought Simpson innocent but because they felt there were enough questions raised about police in the case to sow reasonable doubt—most white folks concluded that black America had lost its collective mind. How could they possibly believe that the LAPD would plant evidence in an attempt to frame or sweeten the case against a criminal defendant? A few years later, had we been paying attention (but of course, we were not), we would have had our answer. It was then that the scandal in the city’s Ramparts division broke, implicating dozens of police in over a hundred cases of misconduct, including, in one incident, shooting a gang member at point blank range and then planting a weapon on him to make the incident appear as self-defense. So putting aside the guilt or innocence of O.J,, clearly it was not irrational for black Angelenos (and Americans) to give one the likes of Mark Fuhrman side-eye after his own racism was revealed in that case.
I think this, more than anything, is the source of our trouble when it comes to racial division in this country. The inability of white people to hear black reality—to not even know that there is one and that it differs from our own—makes it nearly impossible to move forward. But how can we expect black folks to trust law enforcement or to view it in the same heroic and selfless terms that so many of us apparently do? The law has been a weapon used against black bodies, not a shield intended to defend them, and for a very long time.
In his contribution to Jill Nelson’s 2000 anthology on police brutality, scholar Robin D.G Kelley reminds us of the bill of particulars.* As Kelley notes, in colonial Virginia, slave owners were allowed to beat, burn, and even mutilate slaves without fear of punishment; and throughout the colonial period, police not only looked the other way at the commission of brutality against black folks, but were actively engaged in the forcible suppression of slave uprisings and insurrections. Later, after abolition, law enforcement regularly and repeatedly released black prisoners into the hands of lynch mobs and stood by as their bodies were hanged from trees, burned with blowtorches, body parts amputated and given out as souvenirs. In city after city, north and south, police either stood by or actively participated in pogroms against African American communities: in Wilmington, North Carolina, Atlanta, New Orleans, New York City, Akron and Birmingham, just to name a few. In one particularly egregious anti-black rampage in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, police shot blacks dead in the street as part of an orgy of violence aimed at African Americans who had moved from the Deep South in search of jobs. One hundred and fifty were killed, including thirty-nine children whose skulls were crushed and whose bodies were thrown into bonfires set by white mobs. In the 1920s, it is estimated that half of all black people who were killed by whites, were killed by white police officers.
But Kelley continues: In 1943 white police in Detroit joined with others of their racial compatriots, attacking blacks who had dared to move into previously all-white public housing, killing seventeen. In the 1960s and early ’70s police killed over two dozen members of the Black Panther Party, including those like Mark Clark and Fred Hampton in Chicago, asleep in their beds at the time their apartment was raided. In 1985, Philadelphia law enforcement perpetrated an all-out assault on members of the MOVE organization, bombing their row houses from state police helicopters, killing eleven, including five children, destroying sixty-one homes and leaving hundreds homeless.
These are but a few of the stories one could tell, and which Kelley does in his extraordinary recitation of the history—and for most whites, we are without real knowledge of any of them. But they and others like them are incidents burned into the cell memory of black America. They haven’t the luxury of forgetting, even as we apparently cannot be bothered to remember, or to learn of these things in the first place. Bull Connor, Sheriff Jim Clark, Deputy Cecil Price: these are not far-away characters for most black folks. How could they be? After all, more than a few still carry the scars inflicted by men such as they. And while few of us would think to ridicule Jews for still harboring less than warm feelings for Germans some seventy years later—we would understand the lack of trust, the wariness, even the anger—we apparently find it hard to understand the same historically-embedded logic of black trepidation and contempt for law enforcement in this country. And this is so, even as black folks’ negative experiences with police have extended well beyond the time frame of Hitler’s twelve year Reich, and even as those experiences did not stop seventy years ago, or even seventy days ago, or seventy minutes.
Can we perhaps, just this once, admit our collective blind spot? Admit that there are things going on, and that have been going on a very long time, about which we know nothing? Might we suspend our disbelief, just long enough to gain some much needed insights about the society we share? One wonders what it will take for us to not merely listen but actually to hear the voices of black parents, fearful that the next time their child walks out the door may be the last, and all because someone—an officer or a self-appointed vigilante—sees them as dangerous, as disrespectful, as reaching for their gun? Might we be able to hear that without deftly pivoting to the much more comfortable (for us) topic of black crime or single-parent homes? Without deflecting the real and understandable fear of police abuse with lectures about the danger of having a victim mentality—especially ironic given that such lectures come from a people who apparently see ourselves as the always imminent victims of big black men?
Can we just put aside all we think we know about black communities (most of which could fit in a thimble, truth be told) and imagine what it must feel like to walk through life as the embodiment of other people’s fear, as a monster that haunts their dreams the way Freddie Kreuger does in the movies? To be the physical representation of what marks a neighborhood as bad, a school as bad, not because of anything you have actually done, but simply because of the color of your skin? Surely that is not an inconsequential weight to bear. To go through life, every day, having to think about how to behave so as not to scare white people, or so as not to trigger our contempt—thinking about how to dress, and how to walk and how to talk and how to respond to a cop (not because you’re wanting to be polite, but because you’d like to see your mother again)—is work; and it’s harder than any job that any white person has ever had in this country. To be seen as a font of cultural contagion is tantamount to being a modern day leper.
And then perhaps we might spend a few minutes considering what this does to the young black child, and how it differs from the way that white children grow up. Think about how you would respond to the world if that world told you every day how awful you were, how horrible your community was, and how pathological your family. That’s what we’re telling black people daily. Every time police call the people they are sworn to protect animals, as at least one Ferguson officer was willing to do on camera, we tell them this. Every time we shrug at the way police routinely stop and frisk young black men, we tell them this. Every time we turn away from the clear disparities in our nation’s schools, which relegate the black and brown to classrooms led by the least experienced teachers, we tell them this. Every time Bill O’Reilly pontificates about “black culture” and every time Barack Obama tells black men to be better fathers, we tell them this: that they are uniquely flawed, uniquely pathological, a cancerous mass of moral decrepitude to be feared, scorned, surveilled, incarcerated and discarded. The constant drumbeat of negativity is so normalized by now that it forms the backdrop of every conversation about black people held in white spaces when black folks themselves are not around. It is like the way your knee jumps when the doctor taps it with that little hammer thing during a check-up: a reflex by now instinctual, automatic, unthinking.
And still we pretend that one can think these things—that vast numbers of us can—and yet be capable of treating black folks fairly in the workforce, housing market, schools or in the streets; that we can, on the one hand, view the larger black community as a chaotic maelstrom of iniquity, while still managing, on the other, to treat black loan applicants, job applicants, students or random strangers as mere individuals. That we can somehow thread the needle between our grand aspirations to equanimity as Americans and our deeply internalized biases regarding broad swaths of our nation’s people.
But we can’t; and it is in these moments—moments like those provided by events in Ferguson—that the limits of our commitment to that aspirational America are laid bare. It is in moments like these when the chasm between our respective understandings of the world—itself opened up by the equally cavernous differences in the way we’ve experienced it—seems almost impossible to bridge. But bridge them we must, before the strain of our repetitive motion disorder does permanent and untreatable damage to our collective national body.
That's great bud.....love this.......
Strategic searches using the TA theory, also know as blind luck.....saw the name and it rang a bell, probably from "The Jerk"
Thanks for the great link and read on them.
Harlem Nocturne - The Viscounts
How Can You Be So Foul - Don Julian & The Meadowlarks