Fuck Nazi Sympathy

I've been thinking about this subject since yesterday and I figured I'd post a few things.

The first is the lyrics to Aus Rotten's song "Fuck Nazi Sympathy." These are beautiful for their simplicity and truth:

Don't respect something that has no respect

Don't sympathize with something that has no sympathy

Don't understand something that has no understanding

Don't give them freedom cause they're not gonna give you yours

Fuck Nazi sympathy

Next is a quote from Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) on his extensive work with the black freedom struggle in the 1960s, from being a Freedom Rider to his work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council, particularly working in Mississippi's Freedom Summer and organizing the oppressed, exploited and terrorized black population of Alabama's Lowndes County (known as "Bloody Lowndes" for the astonishing levels of violence that white people maintained to keep black people down and afraid), to his fresh-out-of-jail for the twenty-seventh time (really) proclamation of Black Power during James Meredith's March against Fear:

I never saw my responsibility to be the moral and spiritual reclamation of some racist thug. I would settle for changing his behavior, period. Moral suasion, legal proscription, or even force of arms, whatever it ultimately took, that's what I'd be for.

It's so right on. I don't romanticize or relish the idea of violence. But these Nazis, that's how they make it. You have to meet force with force. And in this case, you have to prevent their highly likely future applications of force (once again, these are people who embrace the Holocaust, there is nothing peaceful or rhetorical about them) with force. Unfortunate but real.

Racism just isn't racist anymore

A Boston police officer who sent a mass e-mail referring to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. as a "banana-eating jungle monkey" has apologized, saying he's not a racist.

Officer Justin Barrett told a Boston television station on Wednesday night that he was sorry for the e-mail.

"I regret that I used such words," Barrett told CNN affiliate WCVB-TV. "I have so many friends of every type of culture and race you can name. I am not a racist."

...In Barrett's e-mail, which was posted on a Boston television station's Web site, he declared that if he had "been the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (oleoresin capsicum, or pepper spray) deserving of his belligerent non-compliance."

Barrett used the "jungle monkey" phrase four times, three times referring to Gates and once referring to Abraham's writing as "jungle monkey gibberish."

It's getting so hard to be racist these days. Nobody's racist anymore. All these people who publicly say and do things that used to be considered racist, like the above pig, like Don Imus, like the pig who arrested Gates, or pigs who use the letter "N" to denote black people's race on traffic tickets, they just aren't racist now. Sure, they hate black people and everything, fuck with them based on their skin color, but I guess they just don't mean it. Maybe they're accidental racists. Unwilling racists.

Anyway, when I call someone a banana-eating jungle monkey, I want them to be offended, in a serious way. And they used to be. Unfortunately, they won't anymore, since it's no longer a racist term. I get it all the time these days. When I go out to eat, the person waiting on me often says, "Do you know what you'd like to order, you banana-eating jungle monkey?" When the UPS guy comes to our door, he frequently tells me, "Hey banana-eating jungle monkey, I've got a package for you." At the health food store, where they know me, most of the staff greets me with, "Hello banana-eating jungle monkey, how are you today?" And I'm not even black. I get it all the time though, you know? What a bummer.

What's it gonna take? I think we need new terms. The old ones are played out and have long since lost their sharp edge due to constant use. Who would have thought that banana-eating jungle monkey would become common, non-offensive parlance? I guess everything changes with time. It's like how "bad" started to mean "really awesome" in the 1960s.