Tag: racism

Yet another reason #57

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Should I start arbitrarily numbering these?  At this point, I don’t see why I shouldn’t considering that it really doesn’t feel like more than a day goes by where I don’t pat myself on the back for unloading my old house when I did.

But anyway, my old stomping grounds is now the City of South Fulton, which at first was supposed to be something of an interim name, but considering they just spent $1,500 tax dollars to “design” a new crest for it, it looks like it just might be for reals.  Normally this wouldn’t really be worth mentioning, because it’s not uncommon for towns and cities to want to brand/re-brand themselves, so that they can try to establish some semblance of an identity.  But because I’m mentioning it now, obviously there’s got to be something ironic, cringe-worthy or really stupid to warrant mention.

For reasons completely unknown to the vast majority of South Fulton residents, the city’s new crest features imagery and symbolism of the Egyptian sun god Ra, some ankhs, and for more unknown reasons has some Swahili word around the crest as well.

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You’re better than this, Adande

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I like J.A. Adande, as a sports journalist.  I remember him best as the straight man on Around the Horn, but in spite of his “role,” he was always a source of informative and insightful sports opinions, on the show and in the times that I’ve come across his writing on the internet throughout the years.

However, I don’t know it’s because it was for The Undefeated, an online rag that doesn’t hide its black bias, and he’s just trying to appeal to its target audience, or he’s deciding to waver from his modus operandi of logical and educated opinions; but his article about how “this isn’t the baseball he grew up watching because there aren’t enough black guys in it and the ones that are aren’t aren’t playing ‘black enough’ baseball” seems just so, so, so beneath a guy I’ve always held in regard for integrity and not needing to ever play the race card in order to look intelligent.

Basically, Adande says the Cincinnati Reds’ Billy Hamilton (a black player) runs down flyballs at the wall, is a fast runner and steals a lot of bases is playing “black baseball.”

By this logic, Mike Trout, Trea Turner and Kevin Pillar, are playing, black baseball.  These are also guys who are very good outfielders who are capable of making plays at the wall and occasionally robbing some home runs, and they are also very fast runners who steal lots of bases.  However, all three of them are white guys, thus negating Adande’s logic of what defines “black baseball,” and how absurd it is to associate such styles of play solely with the color of a player’s skin.

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This is precisely why my trust in white people is fractured

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Among the vast majority of nerds that comprise of the vast majority of my social media circles, there was an individual that many of us knew/knew of identified as having been present in Charlottesville during the weekend of hell there.  This was confirmed by commentary made by them that stated as such, and that’s pretty much all that there needed to be known by the community before the witch hunt began and the shit started to fly.

Typically, my go-to move on social media is to unfollow people but not outright unfriend people, if I don’t like seeing what people post.  Whether they post too much for my liking, post opinions that I don’t want to see, flood my streams full of narcissism and/or selfies, or all of the above, among other reasons, I’ll usually unfollow first, but rarely unfriend.  I don’t want paranoid people eventually discovering that they’ve been unfriended and to have an uncomfortable conversation later down the line, and if it can be avoided, I’d rather avoid it.

But it’s not every day that you find out that someone you know personally, have allowed into your home, and allowed to pet and carry your dog, with smiles and seeming sincerity, marched in a rally and chanted discriminatory rhetoric with known white supremacists.

This is why my trust in white people has taken a critical hit, and why I can’t feel like I can ever let my guard down with them.  Even those that I’ve known for a while, apparently.

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A wise man once said

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

– George Santayana

Across the country, statues representative of Confederate history are being defaced, vandalized, toppled or removed outright.  I understand why these particular symbols are being attacked especially in relation to current events; but I don’t agree with it.

Sure, the Confederacy is symbolic of racism, and racism is a never-ending hot topic, but I just think that there’s something inherently risky about the rabid want from the left to have all Confederate statues and monuments removed. 

I don’t like the whole slavery and discrimination representative of the Confederacy as much as the next liberal-thinking individual, but I’m also cognizant of the face that this shit actually happened.  It’s history, these are things that have actually occurred on American soil, and I think that there is something important that we as Americans, should always remember this kind of stuff, whether it is good or bad.

Removing statues, plaques and historical markers doesn’t delete history, but it does serve to assist in the forgetting of it.  And forgetting history leads back to that famous quote that has been paraphrased and misquoted by many, however with the intended meaning never really changing: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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What Charlottesville has done to me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s not often I want to go back to a major topical event, but admittedly, I’m having a hard time letting this one go.  It’s on the tongue of every news outlet, and even in the endlessly flowing stream of social media, it’s still a hot topic that is still the talk of the town.  But the emergence of blatant white supremacy, the supposed neo-Nazis, and just plain eruption of bigotry that took America by storm in of all places, Charlottesville, Virginia has been a pretty big story, with some everlasting repercussions and impressions, whether people other than myself want to admit to it or not.

Originally, I assumed it was mostly populated by the degenerate hill tribes of Virginia where the KKK is known to still be around, but it turns out that it was slightly more organized, and comprised of people from all around America.  Why Charlottesville was chosen as their point of conglomeration was a small question I had, but given the obvious answer that such a demonstration would never have been able to fly in Northern Virginia, where they’d have been eaten alive by the vast mixing bowl of the region, with the same sentiment being similar in the Commonwealth’s capital of Richmond. 

My friends and I have laughed about how this would only have ended in tragic-ironic gun violence if it happened in the next largest populace of the Virginia Beach-Tidewater region, which has very large black communities with many notorious gang issues, whom would probably love to band together to oppose a bunch of white supremacists, so it pretty much left Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia as the only logical place to gather and blather on about white-this and white-that and all their stupid shit that they somehow think is remotely acceptable in 2017.

I can’t get over the irony in that Charlottesville is the place where I learned Korean, a language not belonging to whitey, is also a place where large numbers of angry white bigots gathered to light tiki torches and chant about their supposed dying culture.  Obviously, it’s not so much a reflection of Charlottesville itself, as much as it is the unfortunate choice of gathering of a bunch of racists, but that’s how history works; Charlottesville is a site where hatred gathered, boiled over, and became national news.

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This is precisely why Northern Virginia wants to secede

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I want to do nothing but make fun of the fact that they’re all carrying tiki torches, probably purchased for $3 a pop at their local Walmart or convenience store, and how they probably bitch about how fuel costs more than the hardware itself.  And how it’s hard to really take them seriously because they’re protecting themselves from mosquitos at the same time they’re marching like sheep, preaching bigoted messages of white purity and some other hateful rhetoric.

But it’s because of the bigoted messages of white purity and some other hateful rhetoric that I can’t just laugh at the tiki torches, and instead have to wince and acknowledge that somehow, this is 2017 and not 1917.

Here’s the thing – I am a native Virginian.  I was born in Virginia, and spent 21 years of my life in Virginia.  Seeing shit like large, organized white supremacy groups marching down the campus of the University of Virginia is something that I never thought I would really see in my lifetime, and really, really makes me glad that I don’t live in Virginia anymore.  It makes me ashamed of the state I was born in and grew up in, and I wish I could deny my Virginia origins.

This isn’t a post about a topic because it’s topical, it’s a post because there is a part of me that has some relation to the situation in the fact that this shit is happening not that far from where I grew up.

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Another reason why the NFL is stupid

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t particularly care much about Colin Kaepernick.  I thought he was arrogant, but more importantly he played for the 49ers and I think all San Francisco sports teams have the most entitled and insufferable sports fans on the planet, therefore I dislike them.  But there’s no denying his talent; he’s a pretty capable quarterback with a decent arm, good instincts and great mobility.  And then there’s the 2012 season where he basically put the entire franchise on his back and nearly single-handedly carried the franchise to a Super Bowl victory was nothing short of incredible, and a good indication of what kind of talent he was capable of unleashing.

And I’ll be the first to say that I wasn’t particularly keen on his decision to refuse to stand for the National Anthem, because I thought it was selfish and disrespectful, but ultimately as Americans, we have the right to choose to do things like such, regardless of what other think.  Ultimately, it was such choices that have led to his blatant and obvious blackballing by the NFL, and at time I’m writing this, Colin Kaepernick has no team and has no job in the NFL.

The thing is, it’s not because there aren’t teams that don’t need capable quarterbacks; the Browns, Dolphins and especially the Jets come to mind.  None of them truly have a QB that’s a lock to start the season, and there’s a litany of names being thrown around just those three teams; some, whom people have heard of, like Johnny Manziel and Robert Griffin III, some, nobody has heard of, like the guys all competing for the Jets’ starting job, and then there’s Jay Cutler who went from one accursed franchise, the Bears to another accursed franchise, the Dolphins.

Colin Kaepernick does not have a job, because the NFL has a personal problem with the man, and is letting it affect the professional fortunes of him, as well as any team that might benefit from the acquisition of an athlete like him.

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