Friday, July 28, 2017

Valerian Spoliers: They Killed Rihanna in a Pile of Garbage

I tried to see Girls Trip, nicknamed the black version of Rough Night. The difference is blaringly obvious: Girls Trip got rave reviews. Unfortunately, Girls Trip was sold out in 3 theatres that I searched! Good on Girl’s Trip, but what should I see now? Why not Valerian and the City of 1000 Planets?
I’ll tell you why the hell not.
I was so ready for Valerian. I like Rihanna, and I wanted to see her redeem herself from Battleship. I had no idea who the hell else was in the movie. No matter. A sci-fi visual stimulant would do me well.
The film starts in 2020 on two space stations in earth’s orbit that are merging. A team of Russian astronauts greet a team of Chinese astronauts. This leads to a montage of astronauts from different countries greeting each other. Vague Arabian astronauts, Indian or Pakistani astronauts, Probably South American or Central American astronauts. Some-Place-in-Africa astronauts…I thought, “Oh shit. This movie is going to be diverse AF!” That is about as diverse as the film gets until Rihanna. The “astronauts” then start looking otherworldly. The welcome committee shake hands with so many CGI aliens, I wondered if they blew their budget on the first five minutes. Then there is a voice-over that says that the space station is so big that it is going to crash into the earth, so they’re going to put booster rockets on it and let it flow into some slipstream in space, not necessarily knowing where they’re going. To put that in perspective, imagine a trailer park on a hill where the residents decided to stack and bolt their homes together, and then when the land owner raises the plot fees, they all decide to remove the wheel chock and let the whole damn thing roll wherever. What could possibly go wrong?
Next scene depicts a bunch of wispy sexy beach Navi. They don’t speak English, they were essentially wearing nothing but loin cloths, and they have that feel of being “primitive but noble”. They are the pretty African/South American/Polynesians of the galaxy. Focus is on one particular obviously female beach Navi who starts her day by hopping off her giant marshmallow of a bed, petting some weird Pokemon rat-cat, and skipping around town flirting with a pearl fisher and being friendly to everyone she sees. I half expected someone to say in their alien language, “Mentos: The Fresh Maker”. In lieu of a mint ad, she feeds a giant pearl to her rat-cat, and it immediately shits a thousand pearls out of every pore of his little body, into what looks like a well. Everyone is cool with this, so I guess his pearl shits aren’t toxic. Suddenly, a dark cloud and a fire ball appear in the sky. More fireballs appear, desending on this wispy paradise. They are all going to die. The main female beach Navi is apparently a princess, and she was so busy skipping around town that when the rest of the Beach Navi hunkered down in a bunker, she doesn’t make it in time to get there, and her parents have to watch her get vaporized.
Are you confused yet? Are those giant pearls the eponymous Valerian? Will James Cameron sue for the obvious Avatar rip-off, which is an obvious Ferngully rip-off, which is an obvious Dances with Wolves rip-off, which is an obvious Black Like Me rip-off?
You should be confused, and no, those pearls aren’t Valerian, and the lawsuit may still loom. Valerian is Valerian, and Valerian is a human piece of cardboard who is in the space CIA. He has a colleague/girlfriend who is also made of cardboard named Laureline. You don’t realize that they are in a long term relationship until about halfway through the movie. At first, you just think he’s just trying to smash. Their introduction felt like there was a whole TV series prior to this film, and we should have known how tight they are already. The chemistry between Valerian and Laureline is comprised of inert gases. For the rest of the movie, they are assigned to steal the last Pokemon rat-cat and figure out what anomaly seems to be consuming the adrift space station, or the CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS!!! Shenanigans ensue. Valerian and Laureline basically take turns saving each other’s asses from increasingly fatally calamitous situations. One of the larger calamities is when Laureline is captured by weird frog-slug monsters who intend to feed her alive to their king. Valerian enlists the help of a shapeshifting pole dancer, who happens to be Rihanna. They go to the frog-slug monster headquarters and beat the shit out of them for a little bit. Laureline, Valerian, and shapeshifting Rihanna escape imminent peril by jumping down a garbage chute. Valerian and Laureline, with very breakable bones, come out unscathed. Rihanna, the shapeshifting alien with no bones, who can contort her body into any form she wants, dies, but not before ensuring the couple that it’s fine that she dies, because on her planet, living is like hell. They killed Rihanna in a pile of garbage, and they gave her a garbage line.
The rest of the movie is basically more space shenanigans, you find out one of the leaders of the space CIA was covering up the fact that their organization is responsible for the death of the Beach Navi. There was a battle, and the debris from the battle was the fireballs that destroyed their planet surface. The surviving Beach Navi are the source of the anomaly in the ship, and they need the rat-cat to shit out pearls (which apparently are an energy source) to fuel their ship and they can find a new homeland. Also, I guess Valerian and Laureline get engaged or something.
I would like to say I liked this movie. I really would. It was definitely about two hours. I have so many feelings about this movie. They killed Rihanna in a pile of garbage. The movie is based on a 1960s French comic called Valerian et Laureline, so why wasn’t the movie called “Valerian and Laureline”? they spent equal times saving each other from shenanigans! They killed Rihanna in a pile of garbage. The diversity in the film pretty much ended after the space station merger montage. After that, the movie was mostly white guys and CGI aliens. One of the few people of color, Rihanna, they killed in a pile of garbage. I don’t mind a little bit of kitschy dialogue, but man…wooden AND kitschy? It shouldn’t have taken me that long to figure out that V and L regularly touch D and P! They also killed Rihanna in a pile of garbage.It would have been nice to get more development of all the wird alien worlds that were in the city beyond a bunch of stylized Chinatown chase scenes. They. Killed. Rihanna. In. A. Pile. Of. GARBAGE.
With the right writers, this could have been a good, funny Netflix series. As a 2 hour movie, though, there is no time to explore the worlds and sentient species created without the movie looking like a 3D virtual ride at Disney World…with the exception of The Fifth Element. And Total Recall. And Mars Attacks. And Demolition Man.
Man, y’all killed Rihanna in a pile of garbage. Fuck y’all.
Biggest lesson I can take from watching this movie is that I should have gone to the late show for Girls Trip.

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Oh Good, Another Potentially Racist Revisionist History Show

David Benioff and DB Weiss, the showrunners of Game of Thrones, are set to make an alternate reality show called confederate. It will be a drama in which the South succeeded in seceding from the Union, and slavery in the South is alive and well.
My initial response was, “NOOOOOPE”. Titties and dragons is one thing, but Titties and GRAND Dragons? That’s the damn line. How much more alternate reality torture porn can one consume? The Man in the High Castle is still on, for crying out loud, and I just finished watching The Handmaid’s Tale! And what about all the romanticized visions of the Civil War and its after effects? Do we need another Gone with the Wind, or a Birth of a Nation (both the rapey one AND the rapey one)?Are we not sick of seeing subjugated minorities be even more subjugated? No thanks!
But then I remembered that I had finished reading Underground Airlines. It’s a book by Ben H. Winters about an alternative reality in which the South succeeded in seceding from the Union, and slavery in the South is alive and well. The Underground Railroad has taken to the skies. The main character is a double-agent; trying to join the Airlines, but he’s part of an agency that catches escaped slaves. He’s working to earn his freedom by finding others who tried to steal theirs. There were so many twists and turns, I have barely told you a thing about it. It was goooood.
I can’t forget that I read Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. this was a sci-fi that married the very real horrors and hazards of traveling through the country while black with fantastical Lovecraftian horrors. It even referenced the Negro Motorist Green Book, known in the novel as the Negro Safe Travel Guide.
I also have The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead on deck. That’s an alternative HISTORY narrative about an ACTUAL subterranean train that is the Underground Railroad. That’s all I know about it. I don’t care. I read The Intuitionist, so I know it is going to be good.
ALSO, it is not like this is an original idea. One of the first things I saw on streaming Netflix was a movie called c.S.A: confederate States of America. It was a mockumentary by British filmmakers who went to a South that not only rose the first time; it took over the entire country. One drop rules were in place. Lincoln lived in exile in Canada. The Harlem renaissance was the Toronto Renaissance, because that was where blacks escaped slavery. Movie was broken up by “commercials” that advertised actual products with egregiously racist names. As if the idea of the story weren’t scary enough, the reality of the historical facts gave me nightmares. I would suggest that everyone watch that.
That initial “NOOOOOOPE” was a knee-jerk reaction. Notice that the aforementioned narratives are all created by people of color, except for Matt Ruff, although he IS from Queens...but so it 45, so...I may also be a little bit salty over Underground being cancelled earlier this year. I know a lot of folks think this is a terrible idea, given the political climate. Also, we have enough films that depict black bodies being tormented at the hands of white oppressors, made by both black and white filmmakers. 12 Years a Slave was my limit, and I liked that movie, but I cannot see it again. Now you tell me that two white guys behind Game of Thrones, the show whose first 3 seasons guaranteed gratuitous full frontal nudity and usually subsequent horrid brutalization of women in nearly every episode, are making a romanticized modern slave narrative? It just sounds like a bad idea…
However, Weiss and Benioff hired two writers that give me a little hope: Nichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman. Nichelle wrote for The Good Wife and The Good Wife, and Malcolm wrote for Empire. Whatever you think of these shows, you must admit that they all were a whirlwind of action and drama. Both of them are black, and Nichelle is a woman, and I would think that their perspectives would be well reflected in what they write. Also, the executive producers will be Carolyn Strauss and Bernadette Caulfield, who produced Game of Thrones. So we may not see a Dukes of Hazzard situation, where you want to root hard for the protagonists, but for that fucking American swastika on that fucking car roof.
Who knows if confederate will be good and interesting, or if it will be a masturbatory fantasy fiction for white supremacists history revisionists and  confederate apologists who parrot, “Heritage not Hate”, when we all know that the heritage WAS hate. They won’t start filming until the end of Game of Thrones. Given their backup team, I would hope that this will be a cool anti-confederate saboteur film in which a female black descendant of Robert E. Lee topples the country…given that it’s GoT showrunners, I guess a boob here or there, but an empowered breast, not slave breasts. The ball is in their court, though. They’d better not fuck this up.

#JustineDamond: A Police Shooting Re-Cast

It has been nearly a week since unarmed Justine Damond was fatally shot by a police officer after calling 911 about a disturbance. I have to say, I’m disappointed on the usual suspects on both sides. Though the news coverage is thorough, usually I’d see/hear a bunch of opinion pieces from #BlackLivesMatter folk, decrying the unnecessary, excessive use of force by the police officer, who we assume will have an excuse about being “spooked” by Ms. Damond, which is why he had to shoot. #JustineDamond and #JusticeForJustine aren’t even in the top ten of Twitter mentions. I’ll give it to a few people, they are making a little bit of noise, but the resounding sound of frustration and rage that came from Philando Castile or Tamir Rice’s case is just not there.
On the other side, the #BlueLivesMatter / #AllLivesMatter folk have not done their usual caping for the officers involved. I haven’t heard anyone make inane excuses for the police, or say that Justine Damond’s pyjamas looked intimidating. No one pulled out the “if you follow the rules, you won’t get shot” mantra. No deep dives into Damond’s personal history to see if she got detention or may have stolen a pen from a bank, so that they could demonize her and label her a thug. No comparisons of her to an animal.
Perhaps it’s because Justine Damond is a blond white woman, and the officer, Mohamed Noor, is a Somali-American. Neither side knows what to do. #BLM is used to rallying about the deaths of black men and women, and really, any person of color. This is a white woman. Though white people in general are shot more than black people, but proportionally to population, this is a rare occasion. Still…This is a perfect opportunity to show that police brutality and lack of real change will affect EVERYONE. It shouldn’t be squandered.
And maybe Mohamed Noor’s African-ness, Muslim-ness, and Immigrant-ness are why the BlueAlls haven’t said a word. They are usually quick to cape for a cop, even if he shot an unarmed man in the back while running away, even if he arrested someone essentially for smoking in her car, even if he shot someone who was on the ground lying down with his hands spread out announcing that he is an unarmed mental health counselor trying to calm down his autistic patient who is holding a toy truck, not a gun. You can bet that someone will say, “Well, it’s just not clear”, “We don’t know…”, and other weak excuses for doing legal drive-bys on pre-teens. This is a perfect time to REALLY express that blue lives matter and all lives matter, and prove that it isn’t
what we suspect it is: a knee-jerk racist reaction to black people announcing that they want respect. Could it be that the casual BlueAll is having problems wrapping their head around the officer’s identity right now? Usually it’s a white cop. This time, it’s a Muslim, a demographic that has been demonized, an immigrant, another demonized identity, and black, an identity that…well…you can
read just 3/5 of a history book to figure it out…not one approved by the Texas School Board. Regardless, if they don’t speak up and talk about this officer the way they do for previous officers in this situation, it’s possible that a bunch of racist asshats will step in and do the talking for them.
UPDATE: A bunch of racist asshats stepped in and did the talking for them. Fox News ran a story about Mohamed Noor. From the headline on, they were adamant to tell you that the officer is an immigrant, Somali (one of the countries on 45’s banned travel list), and that he is Muslim. Fox is good at dog whistling. Pamela Geller went all out and wrote a whole article entitled “First Somali-Muslim Police Officer in Minnesota KILLS Blonde Yoga Instructor in Cold Blood”. What followed was her usual standard diatribe about how Muslims hate women, how immigrants will kill us all, and how refugees are wolves in hijabs, ready to strike at any time. What else would you expect from a woman so enthusiastically racist, she expressed her hate all through the NYC Subway System from 2012 until the New York transit ad company disallowed political messages because of her? Geller and Fox are just the tips of some racist icebergs. The narrative is already being crafted that Noor is a sleeper cell, that he had fear of a woman outside of a niqab, that he wished to murder white Americans (Damond was Australian, btw). BlueAlls really shit the bed on this one. They lost their chance to blindly defend a cop, and now their shittier cousins have taken the reigns…or maybe they were the BlueAlls the whole time.
#BLMs kind of shit the bed, too, to be fair. This time, it doesn’t matter that Damond was white. She was gunned down by an officer of the law. Is not excessive police violence the crux of why BLM exists? Yes, it was originally about excessive use of force against black people and other people of color, but it always spills over to everyone. The problem is the training that gives police the mindset that everyone is a potential violent suspect, not a citizen, first. Yes, the job is dangerous, but only coming out to knock heads without getting to know the neighborhood is not real protection. If anything, #BLM could find some humor in talking and doing more regarding this incident. It would be just like Affirmative Action: It was supposedly targeted for people of color, but inevitably white women will benefit more from it.

Monday, July 17, 2017

Would There Be More Coverage if R. Kelly Assaulted A White Girl?

I never liked R. Kelly. I was not there for Public Announcement. I wasn’t a fan of 12Play. I didn’t believe his 2-week stint that he promised to go “clean and do gospel”, and I was not surprised that the year after “I Believe I Can Fly” he sang chorus, “I’m fucking you tonight”. The line, “My mind is telling me, ‘No’, but my body is telling me, ‘Yes’”, always rubbed me the wrong way. It sounded a little rapey, and that was before I had any inkling of rape culture. I was ankh-right; I was part of the problem, yet I STILL knew there was something wrong with a little “Bump n’ Grind” in this situation. While others laughed at the “Trapped in the Closet” series, I watched and disliked every tired trope he doled out in the name of “artistic expression”. And that is all just what he did in the studio! I didn’t understand why people signed off on his inappropriate relationship with Aaliyah, the pee video, the botched trial, and now this report of a “sex cult” where he imprisoned young women who he promised guidance.
I know that some will allege that this new news about R. Kelly is just a conspiracy to “take down another prominent black man”. Right, perhaps he and Chris Brown tried to buy NBC with Bill Cosby. There is more than enough evidence to take R. Kelly down, some that he produced himself, if we cared about victims of sexual assault enough. Caping for people who don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves doesn’t help anything.  The Struggle will be better off without them. If you’re defending or ignoring R. Kelly’s actions because you just REALLY like his music, you are the worst. This means that your personal entertainment is more important to you than his victims’ lives. The entertainment industry is banking on that, and you are buying into it. Just admit that you are as soulless as them, and move one.
While reading about R. Kelly’s latest news, I also am reading about Justine Damond, who was killed by Minneapolis police after SHE called 911 about a disturbance. She was an Australian expat who was going to be married in August. She was so excited about it that she had already gone by her husband-to-be’s family name. Exactly what potential threat does an unarmed yoga instructor in a robe pose that she needed to be lethally dispatched at point blank range? People are up in arms about this. They are incensed that this could happen…in the same city that ju8st acquitted Philando Castile’s killer and gave him $48,500 to resign from the police force. Since we’re just hearing about Damond’s case, there is no telling whether a jury will convict the officer who shot her, and there is no body or dash camera footage to submit as evidence. Judging by the uproar so far, from all angles, it seems that paid administrative leave will turn to unpaid jail time.
This kind of hints at what I’ve been thinking for years: America is not going to give a damn until a pretty white woman is involved. It looks like it took pretty white woman for people to take police practices and violence seriously. I am not surprised. When I think about people who have done things with impunity, they hadn’t done what they did to any pretty white women. Chris Brown not only served laughable time for abusing Rihanna, but also his industry welcomed him back with open arms, and he has had subsequent success, and he hasn’t changed at all. The vitriol he spits at women online is disgusting, and the case in which he threatened death on Karreuche Tran so much that she filed for a permanent restraining order shows how little he has grown as a person. Just looking at missing persons case, black people make up nearly 33% of the cases, even though we are only 13% of the population. Last year, dozens of girls of color went missing in the Mid-Atlantic, but there was barely a line in the news about it until months later. The second a pretty white woman goes missing for 6 hours, the FBI is called in. So is this all proof that had R. Kelly peed on a pretty white girl, he’d be in jail right now, and unable to start a sex cult/prison?
NOOOOPE. America doesn’t give a damn about women at all. Brock Turner is white, and he assaulted a pretty white woman, and after serving 3 months, 1.8% of the potential jail time he could have served, he is out free. Nate Parker, a black man, “allegedly” assaulted a white woman in college, was acquitted, and he still managed to carve out a pretty successful acting and directing career for himself. I haven’t heard much from him this year, but I doubt we’ve heard the last of him. Sadly, she took her own life. Nearly around the time that Brock turner was about to leave jail, David Becker was given probation for assaulting two women. Nicholas Fifield forced himself on a mentally handicapped woman, but the DA thought that prison wouldn’t do him any good. A judge gave a man who raped his 12-year old daughter a suspended sentence and allowed him to serve the 60 days of jail time over the course of 6 months. So it was like weekend camp for him. If you think this is just a case of some judges gone misogyny wild, remember that Eminem made a multiplatinum career out of joyfully discussing maiming, raping, and killing everyone from random pop stars he just doesn’t like to his own ex-wife, the mother of his daughter. Bill Cosby is still roaming free, and a good chunk of his accusers are white. It IS an odd coincidence that he got a very ambiguous trial outcome, and at least for me, Andrea Constand is ethnically ambiguous.  However, not giving a damn about women is ubiquitous in this country. We talk a good game about caring, but we really don’t give a damn.

I realize it was common for black men to be lynched for so much as looking at white women. Sometimes the white woman in question never existed. This is definitely not the case here, and don’t think that this is proof that that America holds such an affinity to white women as to put them on a pedestal and protect them like they are Faberge eggs and black men are jewel-hungry foxes. America only uses white women to push a narrative that black men are craven monsters. We’ve been fridging white women since before Gail Simone coined the term “Women in Refrigerators”. Judging by the lack of rape convictions, the rollbacks in women's health care funding, and who is running the country, I don't think that sad truth will slow down in at least the next 4 years.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Is "Dr." Umar Johnson Donald Trump's REAL Son?

I am not sure why, but “Dr.” Umar Johnson has been getting a bit more airplay. He was once relegated to grainy YouTube videos where he pop-locks to his own homophobic diatribe, or pretends he’s got a phone call when he doesn’t…and pop-locks to his own homophobic diatribe. Recently, he was on Power 105.1 spitting that hot hoteptry. Then he followed up his radio visit with a sit-down on Roland Martin’s NewsOne Now and a chorus of naysayers. On NewsOne Now, I watched “Dr.” Umar not only move his standard for who he respects in the Struggle® based on who they marry because none of his idols met that standard, he also re-claimed to be related to Frederick Douglass, even though the family of Frederick Douglass wrote a statement and published it explicitly stating, “We don’t know that nigga”. He then said that he was a direct descendent of some dude named Ricky, who MIGHT have been Frederick Douglass’s cousin, or maybe they were brothers, but they rolled TIGHT, so he’s got some Douglass blood in him. It sounds like when the new kid in school is caught lying about knowing Beyoncé™. Just stop, “Dr.” Umar. Just be yourself.
So I’m watching these snippets of “Dr.” Umar’s interviews while also watching this whole Donald Trump, Jr. email/collusion thing. I’m sure Junior was trying to garner favor from dad. It must be difficult knowing he’s not the favorite child. He’s the Jan Brady of the Trump clan. Man, Junior is bad at lying, and even worse at telling the truth! How was he being open and transparent when he sat on that information for a year? Did he lie on his SF86? There’s a question on there that explicitly asks if you’ve had contact with ANY foreign national in the past 7 years. Even if you think it’s insignificant, you HAVE to put it down, because THEY WILL FIND OUT. When I filled out mine, I didn’t think anything about the small talk I had with a STORE CLERK at a grocer in Cyprus, and the investigator straight asked, “So you didn’t say a word to anyone in this store in Cyprus?” What the hell, man! I assumed I was being watched, but can you at least PRETEND I’m paranoid? Jeez…All that work that Junior did, and all he got from Daddy was a lame statement about him being a “high-quality person”. Come on! Steaks are “high quality”…except for Trump steaks. Why can’t he at least PRETEND that Junior is his blood? This is when it dawned on me: maybe Junior isn’t REALLY his son. Maybe there is someone else who Don, Sr. sees as his son.
What if “Dr.” Umar Johnson is the REAL son of Donald Trump?
I already posited that Donald Trump is Hotep Supreme, which would make him the king of both the alt-right AND the ankh-right. “Dr.” Umar proclaims himself the “Prince of Pan-Africanism”. In this case, he is misusing the word “Pan-Africanism”. What he means is “pseudo ‘African pride’ shit that he made up to take your money”, so ankh-right. If Umar is the Prince, and Don, Sr. is the King, and Don, Jr. is just “high-quality”, then maybe…Besides, “Dr.” Umar and Don, Sr. have a LOT in common behavior-wise:
SCHOOLS AND CHARITIES
“Dr.” Umar Johnson formed a charity and collected nearly a million dollars. The money is supposed to go to building a charter school to educate black boys. As of this writing, it’s been 2 years, and there are 0 schools. Ask him about it, and he has a bunch of excuses. He won’t even provide a record of what he’s done with the money. I wager there were a lot of beard grooming expenses. Say what you want about the man, but “Dr.” Umar knows how to keep a beard TIGHT.
Donny, Sr. has ripped people off of money with both his charities AND Trump University. The Trump Foundation funds have been used to buy paintings of Trump, and he’s promised money to children’s hospitals and not delivered. Even his fundraiser “for the troops” didn’t actually give any money to any veteran’s organization until an investigative reporter published that no money raised went anywhere. And have we seen any tax returns? He has plenty of excuses for NOT having them. So when it comes to ripping off people who want to do a good thing, “Dr.” Umar and Don, Sr. are thick as thieves.
WOMEN
“Dr.” Umar is ALWAYS putting down women, all while claiming he wants to hoist them up. Just the fact that he’s making a school only for boys is a clue. I would say there’s nothing wrong with that, but he also admonishes women for being independent in thought and body. He doesn’t think there is a need for a “good” woman to get a higher education than her man. He often accuses women of “causing” homosexuality or “softness” in their kids. And he has no problem denigrating and calling women out of their names who either disagree with him or just ask him a question. He called a woman “Miss Piggy” once because she was looking into some fraud allegations against him. He also didn’t invent the term “negro bed wench” to refer to black women who have had relationships with white men, but he definitely has used the term.
You know who else says “Miss Piggy”? Don, Sr.! He called a former Miss Universe Alicia Machado Miss Piggy, alluding that she needed to lose weight. #1: no one who looks like a giant rotting sack of over-candied yams has any business talking about ANYONE’S weight. #2: She’s MISS UNIVERSE. There is no way she would get that far had it not been for society’s idea of beauty, and her similarity to it…but she is really beautiful…He was likely mad that she is educated and brown, which is a resentment that he shares with “Dr.” Umar when it comes to women. Donny Sr. regularly takes to Twitter or gets behind a camera to express his disdain for women who are likely smarter than him, or more truthfully, women in general. Both of them are cool with spousal rape and sexual assault in general.
FACTS
“Dr.” Umar is good at creating massive webs of lies. Whether it’s about his “teachings” or about his personal life, “Dr.” Umar has no qualms making shit up. There will be a thread of truth, just so that he can claim he’s right, but he makes up so. Much. Shit. When he was called out BY THE FAMILY OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, he moved the goalpost to say he was a descendent of one of Frederick Douglass’s cousins or some BS. Next week, it will be Frederick Douglass’s barber, who he affectionately called, “cousin”. And we still haven’t seen his doctorate. You can verify all of his degrees except that Ph.D. You can’t even find a dissertation, or a graduation ceremony, which is odd, because his “alma mater” records and archives all of this. We’ve already discussed the boys’ school and those donations. I’ll believe that when I see it. On the regular, he repeats the long trope that gay men are helping to “destroy” the black community, because that is fewer men to raise children. That ignores the fact that gay adoptions have been on the rise, because sometimes gay dudes want to raise kids, too! Just last week, he claimed that Chinese is an official language of South Africa, that Buddha translates to “black face”, that black men marry out of their races more than any other race, and that educated black women are a detriment to black men, because they “feminize” children, or they want to date men on their level, or they aren’t “feminine” enough. And Let’s not forget about the Ankh-Right Fight of 2016, where he tore up another Ankh-Right “leader” for an hour, and around minute 40, he picked up his phone and started talking, BUT THEN IT STARTED ACTUALY RINGING. If you’re going to lie, lie better. Challenge him on any of his claims, and he goes after you ad hominem. Expect name calling. Expect him to compare you to a woman, because he thinks that would be an insult. “Dr.” Umar doesn’t take kindly to your critical thinking and maintenance of receipts.
Donald, Sr. PROVIDES receipts and then denies them. His Twitter account is a treasure trove of contradictory statements. He spent how many months demanding Obama’s birth certificate? People think he was the creator of the birther drama, but he just picked it up, and then he ran with it for a year at least. He claimed he had investigators had compelling evidence that Obama’s birth certificate was a fake. He said he had sources and receipts. All of that is a damn lie. After he humiliated himself with the circus that he created, he went on to demand Obama’s school transcripts and acted as if he hadn’t created a shit storm. From November to now, he has been creating a shit storm fuckery, though. He blamed Hillary Clinton’s 3 million popular vote lead on “fraudulent votes” with no evidence. Now there’s a task force to investigate voter rolls. This is not necessary. He just needs to be thankful we’re still using plantation math to determine our presidential elections. Four years ago, he blamed the second Obama win on the very electoral college that gave him a win. Don, Sr. won’t acknowledge that. He insinuated that Comey might have recorded his conversation with him. This was another red herring. He regularly retweeted false stats and memes created by avid white supremacists. When asked about David Duke endorsing him, he stammered through saying he didn’t know who he was. THERE IS VIDEO EVIDENCE OF HIM YEARS AGO SAYING HE KNOWS EXACTLY WHO THE FUCK DAVID DUKE IS. He doesn’t even care that he’s a terrible liar, and that he generates the receipts for his contradictions and deceit. If he gets cornered, he’ll start talking trash about the interviewer, especially if it’s a woman, or he’ll go on a twitter rage about Clinton or Obama, neither of whom are in office in any form. This isn’t a new thing. Back in the 1980s he took out a whole page ad in numerous papers calling for the death penalty in light of the Central Park Five case. When all five people were exonerated because a completely different person admitted to the crime, he didn’t relent in his drag of innocent men. He claimed that he had “reliable” sources” that knew they were guilty. They had reliable DNA evidence that proved that none of them were. Donald, Sr. doesn’t care. The man is unhinged.
I could go on for hours about the many similarities between “Dr.” Umar and Donald, Sr. Their personalities and actions are so alike, I would not be surprised if “Dr.” Umar was Donald Trump’s REAL son. Maybe there was a hospital mix-up. Or maybe that was what Donald was talking about when he said he had a great relationship with “the Blacks”. Perhaps he grabbed one by the afro, and she had either low self-esteem or a fetish for spray-tanned screaming birch trees. Either way, I don’t think that “high-quality” Donald, Jr. is ever going to gain Donald, Sr.’s full love. Just give up Junior. He’s not going to love you like he does Ivanka. He’s never going to want to fuck you.

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

About My Uncle Beauregard

I often have fleeting, racist interactions with people in Rochester, being a black bicyclist (and sometimes pedestrian) who regularly traverses through black and white neighborhoods in the city. Combined with the insults and death threats I get online (which really ramped up since I moved here), It legit happens at least once a month. Right after the election, it was twice a month for a while. It’s like a racist period, except nothing positive comes out of this; just frustration and face-palming. Some have an “Aunt Flo”; I have an “Uncle Beauregard”. The most common situation is a person in a big car yelling, “Get out of the Road”, punctuating with “nigger” or “sambo” or “coon” or “homeboy” or whatever. Sometimes they just scream “nigger” and keep going. All times, they say it and then speed off, as if my legs are a match for their V8 hemi penis extensions. Only one time did a person walking call me nigger while I was biking, but he quickly retracted his statement when I sped onto the sidewalk and told him to say it to my face. Every once in a while, like the other night, a police officer will ask where I got my bike or if I have a receipt for it or something in my bag that is of value. It’s 2017, and I never know if I need to carry my “freedom papers” with me. And people wonder why I’m so scared to death of leaving my house without an ID, even if I don’t plan to drink or buy anything. All of these things that happen on the surface are the canaries in a coal mine of a dark, open secret.
Rochester is racist as hell. The natives love to deny it and talk about Frederick Douglass, but this place is more racist than Baltimore, where I’m from, and Baltimore is south of the Mason-Dixon Line! Rochester has one of the most segregated neighborhoods and schools in the nation. The incarceration rate for people of color compared to white people is through the roof, as is the poverty rate. Diversity on the police force is sorely lacking. This is all systematic, whether intentional or not. You can tout that Rochester has a black mayor, so it CAN’T be racist, but we had a black president for 8 years, and yet Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, etc. are still dead, and their killers are free. One black token doesn’t absolve a community of its past wrongs, especially if they are still in the wrong. I don’t know what happened to Rochester that it is so racist. Maybe it was disdain for the passengers on the Underground Railroad who either passed through to Canada or settled here. After all, Americans in general love hating refugees, even when they do more work than citizens.
I could tell that Rochester may have some “issues” the first time I was stopped by police, and the officer tried to claim that my car’s VIN was counterfeit. That is what he claimed. He followed me for nearly a mile, all while I was following the letter of the law, and as soon as I turned on Andrews off St. Paul, the lights came on. I don’t think it was a coincidence that he stopped me right next to where a predominantly black/ PoC residence was, down the block from two predominantly black clubs. Though this was only one of the few times I was approached by police, in predominantly black neighborhoods, police harassing residents is a lot more common, from Greece to Gates to western Rochester.
I started posting about my interactions in Rochester after someone tried to scratch “nigger” into my car, but only got up to “nig”. Perhaps he had to run, or perhaps he forgot how to spell “nigger”, and he couldn’t google it, because he also forgot how to spell “Google”. Who knows? Regardless, that triggered me to post about my Uncle Beau when he visits. I don’t even post every time something happens. That would be tiring.
I also don’t do it to garner pity or to complain. So why do I do it? It’s just a reminder that things are a bit upside down here, by design. Most reactions to my Uncle Beau ware a few angry faces some sad ones, and words of encouragement or condolence. That’s fine. Despite what some nihilists may say, it is human nature to sympathize and empathize with a person’s bad news. However, one thing really grinds my gears.

If you are saying you’re sorry I was called “nigger” while I’m riding, but you poo-poo anything I’ve said about how society got to the point to where someone thought it is okay to call me “nigger” while I’m riding, then I know a few places where you can put your apologies and e-hugs. If you don’t at least acknowledge the source of the problem, then don’t act surprised at the product of it, especially if you mocked the source. Whenever I talk about Uncle Beau visiting, I’ll see “heartfelt” condolences from a few of these types, and I can’t help but think, “Didn’t you just say last week that it was a 10 year old’s fault that cops pulled guns on him for playing in his own yard? Didn’t you yesterday try to cape for the cop in the Philando Castile case? Didn’t you just say fifteen minutes ago that single parents are too lazy and need to close their legs? GTFOH!” I have no more time or patience for this low-grade fuckery. If you’ve done anything like this, know that your sad faces are noted, and you may get read. Apologize for the things you did, not what someone else did. The sooner we address these root causes, the fewer instances of uncle Beau I have to see, and the less you hear about him.

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