The whiteness of the whale

I'm a big fan of the writings of Herman Melville. Whatever his other (and especially family) problems might have been, racially he was pretty cool, as the Dude might have put it in The Big Lebowski.

This year's political season has reminded me of one of the weirder chapters in Moby-Dick wherein he discusses all the disturbing things about whiteness. My friend Owens Brown, WV NAACP president, updates that chapter here.

A little late

El Cabrero is slacking this week in case you haven't noticed. However, in lieu of nothing at all, here's a link to last week's Front Porch podcast, which was late getting to the web for technical reasons. I'm sorry to say that most of it is about a topic many of us are already sick of, i.e. the coming elections. Anyhow, you can listen here.

Major disgrace

I'm still kind of floored by the recent decision to acquit the Oregon protesters who seized federal property for 41 days and videoed themselves doing it. The contrast between how they were treated and how unarmed African Americans--especially young men--are treated couldn't be more striking.

As more than one person has pointed out, holy white privilege, Batman!

I imagine that if a similar armed uprising was staged by African Americans, there wouldn't have been a trial because they would all have been killed. Period.

This is the kind of legal decision that damages the credibility and legitimacy of the whole system. To the extent it had any to start with.