Ron Christie: Acting White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur

From Publishers Weekly: Ron Christie (Black in the White House: Life Inside George W. Bush's West Wing) aspires to construct a historical account of the pejorative "acting white" and dismantle its legitimacy. He traces the roots of the phrase back to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which "planted the seeds of the idea that black inferiority is the result of blacks seeking favor with whites," but he points to the Black Power movement as the real culprit in propagating the "acting white" slur. While figures such as Homer Plessy and W.E.B. Du Bois stand out for their efforts to achieve political representation for blacks, others such as Marcus Garvey criticized those intentions as opportunities for "acting white." Ron Christie cites Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and President Obama as examples of why "hard work, dressing well, speaking well, and ambitiously pursuing a fulfilling life is not a ˜white' thing." However, the book becomes less credible when Christie, a political analyst and former special assistant to George W. Bush, laments his own experiences of being tagged with the slur he now tries to examine. While Christie's frustration is admirable and his references well researched, the book's tone occasionally comes across as desperate and more personally motivated rather than persuasive and objective.



From Booklist: Ron Christie, a conservative accused of “acting white,” explores the historical roots of that particular insult targeted at blacks who are considered somehow racially disloyal. He goes back to Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the origins of such charges and explores the back and forth tensions between historical figures, including W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, to examine the often confused and contradictory notions of racial loyalty versus individualism. He moves on to examine the lives of black public figures whose authenticity and loyalty have been questioned—Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Barack Obama—and examines the underlying politics of disagreement with views at odds with those of the majority of blacks. Ron Christie argues that many blacks of heroic stature, from Homer Plessy to Rosa Parks, were “acting white” in asserting their rights. He points to the rise of black-power sentiments during the civil rights era and a growing sense of black identity that encouraged a cultural isolation that continues to this day, one that disdains the mainstream middle-class culture as “white” and, therefore, to be avoided.

"I think that there is a clamor for new leadership across the country not just in Washington D.C." — Ron Christie

Ronald I. "Ron" Christie (born c.1969) is an American government relations expert and Republican political strategist, who has also worked as a member of former Vice President Dick Cheney's staff. He is also the author of two books, and an occasional guest on various cable news programs. He serves as an Adjunct Professor at George Washington University and Haverford College. He is currently the CEO of Christie Strategies, a communications and issue management firm that he founded in Alexandria, Virginia. Christie is a native of Palo Alto, California, and has received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Haverford College and a Juris Doctor degree from the George Washington University National Law Center. At the beginning of his career, he served as counsel to Senator George Allen of Virginia and as senior advisor to former House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich. He began working at the White House in 2001, as deputy assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney for domestic policy, advising him on health care, budget, tax and other policy areas. Later that year, he was elected to the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2002, he joined the staff of the President, serving as a Special Assistant to George W. Bush until 2004. Christie was selected by Bush to lead an American delegation to an international conference on volunteerism and civic engagement hosted by Prime Minister Tony Blair in London. Further experience in the United Kingdom included advising the Chancellor of the Exchequer and future Prime Minister Gordon Brown.





After leaving the Bush administration, Ron Christie has been serving as an Adjunct Professor of Strategic Advocacy at the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management. He also teaches a course on strategic advocacy at his alma mater, Haverford College, where he has been appointed a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science. He has also authored two books, and has worked as a columnist for The Hill. He is also an occasional guest on CNN and MSNBC, and a panelist on National Public Radio. Ron Christie was critical of the Republican National Committee's activities under Chairman Michael Steele, telling Ed Schultz of MSNBC on his show in April of 2010 that he was "not happy about the leadership that we have seen out of the Republican National Committee in the last 16 to 18 months. I'm not happy about it. ... The leadership starts at the top, and I think that Chairman Michael Steele is on a very short leash, he has a very, very narrow opportunity to show that he can raise the money, that he can be a strong leader for the party. Otherwise, I think perhaps the clock in the back of his head in his office might be ticking".

Moustafa Bayoumi: How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America

Moustafa Bayoumi is an award-winning writer, and associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, and raised in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, he currently lives in Brooklyn. Bayoumi completed his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is co-editor of The Edward Said Reader (Vintage, 2002), editor of Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israeli/Palestine Conflict (Haymarket Books, 2010) and has published academic essays in publications including Transition, Interventions, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Amerasia, Arab Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Asian American Studies.





His writings have also appeared in The Nation, London Review of Books, and The Village Voice. His essay "Disco Inferno", originally published in The Nation, was included in the collection "Best Music Writing 2006". From 2003 to 2006, he served on the National Council of the American Studies Association, and he is currently an editor for Middle East Report. He is also an occasional columnist for the Progressive Media Project, an initiative of The Progressive magazine, through which his op-eds appear in newspapers across the United States. Bayoumi's work, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America, traces the experiences of seven young Arab-Americans navigating life in a post-September 11 environment, where complicated public perceptions of the attacks gave birth to new brands of stereotypes, fueling widespread discrimination. It is the story of how young Arab and Muslim Americans are forging lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for the enemy. His title is a reference to the W.E.B. Du Bois' 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk. How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America was awarded a 2008 American Book Award and the 2009 Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction.



The author was recently a guest on the NPR program, Talk of the Nation. On the program, he said this: Feisal Abdul Rauf, yes. I think the idea of - behind the project from the very beginning was precisely to model a place like the 92nd Street Y to have some place where we can see - Islam, see American Muslims and the rest of American society come together and create a culture together. And, in fact, they did everything, as they should have, according to plan. They bought the building. They went to the community board and such things. And the project was announced in December of last year to little ado. But then, somehow, in the early summer, it started to generate a lot of hostility. And by the end of the summer, you saw huge crowds around that site in New York to the point where, around the anniversary of September 11th this year, there was a significant demonstration in opposition to it, where - and I went, actually, to see that demonstration, and I've never really seen anything like that in New York City before. I mean, there were thousands of people on the street just yelling, no mosque, no mosque, no mosque, and - a kind of blatant in-your-face anti-Muslim sentiment that really left me quite depressed. On the other hand, there was another demonstration just two blocks away that was a pro - you could call it a pro-Park51 demonstration that was very typical of New York City. It was loud. It was rambunctious. It was very diverse. And that one, to me, seemed much more representative of what New York City was all about. And that one didn't leave me depressed. That one left me quite optimistic. Below is the podcast of that show, in full.





In December of 2010, The Jewish Week wrote this, in mentioning and invoking the author: Howard Wohl, president of Tanger Hillel and a 1964 graduate of Brooklyn College, attributes much of the atmosphere to an episode that took place this summer, when the college instructed all its incoming students to read a controversial book edited by Moustafa Bayoumi, an associate professor of English at the school. The book — “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America” — is a collection of personal stories by and about seven Arabs from Brooklyn. Critics objected to the assignment, saying that Bayoumi takes up the Palestinian cause in his final chapter and provides a decidedly slanted view. Recalling the episode earlier this month, Wohl said his greatest concern is that Brooklyn College doesn’t start to resemble “too many other campuses in North America,” where, in his view, anti-Israel rhetoric has morphed into anti-Semitism, and hate speech has blossomed under the guise of academic freedom.

GRITtv: Moustafa Bayoumi: Midnight on the Mavi Marmara
- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

Don't fire people for confessing fear of Muslims. from Slate Magazine by William Saletan

Twenty-four years ago, Juan Williams wrote Eyes on the Prize, a companion volume to the documentary history of the civil rights movement. The book, like the series, focused on the movement's leaders. But it also explored white America's difficulty in absorbing racial integration. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy struggled to reconcile the truth of the movement's principles with the challenge of holding the country together. Martin Luther King Jr. wrestled with Fannie Lou Hamer over the wisdom of compromising with the Democratic Party. When the Little Rock Nine walked into Central High School, onlookers shrieked and wept. It was a long, slow story of fear, debate, and transcendence. This is how we must understand what's happening today with American Muslims. There are obvious differences: Muslim terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11. But millions of American Muslims who had nothing to do with those attacks, other than losing loved ones in them, are now paying the price in fear and suspicion. And this compounds the difficulty that Muslims, like immigrants and minority religions of previous generations, face in gaining acceptance. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll released last month, Americans expressed a net unfavorable opinion of Islam (49 percent unfavorable to 37 percent favorable), and two-thirds opposed the construction of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero.

Read the full Slate piece here. See also: This Far by Faith: Stories from the African American Religious Experience, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary

Repub Chair Forwards Racist Joke from Drudge Retort: Red Meat for Yellow Dogs by NoGov4Me

David Bartholemew, the head of the Virginia Beach Republican Party, has resigned after forwarding this racist joke in email: "I went down this morning to sign up my Dog for welfare. At first the lady said, 'Dogs are not eligible to draw welfare.' So I explained to her that my Dog is black, unemployed, lazy, can't speak English and has no frigging clue who his Daddy is. So she looked in her policy book to see what it takes to qualify.. My Dog gets his first check Friday."

Just in case you weren't completely clear as to what the Tea Party, the (U.S.) Republican Party, and The Drudge Report were really all about, make sure to sift through those comments carefully.

Eugene Robinson on Race and "Disintegration" from On Point with Tom Ashbrook Podcast

Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson swings a big stick in national policy debates – and he swings from the Left. But this time out he’s not talking policy so much as race. He’s talkign what it meant to be black in America, and what it means now. In his new book “Disintegration,” Robinson says there is no more “black America.” There are, he says, now a bunch of black Americas. There’s a super-rich tier and a super-poor tier. Blacks are going their own ways. Not on the same boat. Divided.

Listen to the podcast show here.

Don't You Know That You Can Count Me Out - In from Democrats.com - The Aggressive Progressives! by davidswanson

Ted Rall's new book "The Anti-American Manifesto" advocates for violent revolution, even if we have to join with rightwingers and racists to do it, and even if we have no control over the outcome which could easily be something worse than what we've got. We have a moral duty, Rall argues, to kill some people. Now, I much prefer a debate over what radical steps to take to a debate over whether it's really appropriate for President Obama to whine about people's lack of enthusiasm for voting. Should we try to pep people up for him or gently nudge him to appoint a new chief of staff who's not a vicious warmongering corporatist?

Read the full Democrats.com post here.