VHS Review: 'Our Friend, Martin' (1998)

Revisiting one of the most ubiquitous Black History Month video cassette staples in the annals of American public education (and yes, it does indeed play fast and loose with the historical accuracy, in case you were wonderin'.)

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

I don't know how you folks spent your Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but if you ask me, there's only one proper way to get our collective Kangs on - and that, of course, is with a screening of the 1998 straight-to-video cartoon Our Friend, Martin.

What, you've never heard of Our Friend, Martin before? Well, if you grew up in elementary school America between the years 1999 and 2005, odds are your local public escuela/indoctrination factory made you watch it at least once a year (if not to commemorate MLK Day, than certainly as filler come Black History Month.) Now, I was in middle school and on the verge of entering high school when the straight-to-video offering was initially released, so I just missed out on this particular early aughties phenomena. But judging from the way the Millennials talk about this 'un on Reddit and 4chan and YouTube, I'd feel pretty comfortable labeling Our Friend, Martin as their generation's The ButterCream Gang - that weird piece of ubiquitous pop cultural ephemera that not only is inextricably tied to one's public education experience, but seems to only exist within the vacuum of elementary school nostalgia.

Even now I'm not sure exactly who bank rolled this thing, or what they're agenda was, or if they even suspected the damn tape would become a VCR staple in every primary school in America for at least half a decade. Whoever it was, though, they had to have had quite a bit of loose change to throw around, considering the staggering number of A-and-B-list celebrities lending their vocal talents to the production. Ed Asner, Angela Bassett, Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, Samuel L. Jackson, James Earl Jones, Ashley Judd, Susan Sarandon, Jon Travolta, OPRAH - hell, they even got Urkel to show up for a day or two in the recording studio to voice a teenaged MLK. It's undoubtedly a star-studded production, and the fact that this thing never made it to TV (or even basic cable, to the best of my knowledge) makes its existence all the more perplexing. I mean, you'd think PBS, if nobody else, would've tried to wrap their mitts around this one, but no - apparently, Our Friend, Martin went straight to video and - for all intents and purposes - just stayed there until YouTube and DailyMotion came along.

And if you've never seen it before, well - consider this in-depth review/analysis either a late MLK, Jr. Day gift or a really early Black History Month present.

The film begins with a title screen for DIC Entertainment, who is best known for producing half of every cartoon made in the 1980s (Nelvana, obviously, did the either half.) Some organization called I.P.M. gets secondary billing, but I have no idea who or what they are. And no, a quick Google search turns up nothing of use, even when you use "Our Friend Martin" as a Boolean assistant. We get this really, really cheesy R&B song as the opening credits rolls, and even better it's called "When We Were Kings" because fuck, sometimes the universe just makes things TOO easy for us.

No, this is the film at its absolute subtlest.

The movie begins proper with these two black kids standing in front of rubble that magically transforms into a fully built house. Oh, and one of them transforms into Martin Luther King, Jr. after entering the Stargate, so there's that.

And because this shit isn't late 1990s enough, we have ourselves a secondary title theme performed by Salt N Pepa, which sounds more like something to bump uglies to than something befitting of a children's animated program. From there, we are introduced to our antagonist, Miles, a precocious black kid who idolizes Hank Aaron, has a nasty ass bedroom and calls his mama "a slave" because she actually wants to work overtime at the office. (Oh, and as an aside, we never see Miles' father in the cartoon. Yeah, that revelation shocked the shit out of me, too.) Then she tells him if he doesn't get his grades up, he won't be able to play baseball and become rich like Barry Bonds and will probably end up slangin' crack down at the Waffle House down by the I-285 interchange. By the way, this kid's house is NICE - we're talking two stories, stairs, a basement, an attic, the fuckin' works. As a matter of fact, one might even call Miles - dare I say it - privileged?

In the next scene Miles is accosted by this fat blond white boy in a purple belly shirt. Eventually the bully, named Kyle, grabs hold of Miles at the bus stop but the old white bus driver almost runs him over and Miles is just barely able to escape. "See you, wouldn't want to be you," Miles says, which, for the record, was an antediluvian phrase even by 1998 standards. So Kyle's dad - voiced by John Travolta of all people - has to drive him to school. Which, fittingly enough, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School. From there, we're introduced to the rest of the cast. There's this skateboarding kid with a country accent (voiced by the little kid from Sling Blade, if you can believe it) and this stuck up Hispanic bitch who considers herself "Madame Curie" and the rest of her cohorts "The Three Stooges." Miles' teacher (whose race is a complete mystery - she could be Dominican or she could be Irish) then tells him she's worried about his slipping grades and he blames it on baseball season. Then he says the only way for a black person to make money in this day and age is through sports or entertainment, and then the teacher says something about Colin Powell and tells Miles that if he doesn't do a good job on his book report about Martin Luther King, he's going to be held back a grade. 

So anyway, the kids go on a field trip to MLK's birth home, and Whoopi Goldberg is the tour guide and the country skateboarder kid LITERALLY asks her if MLK had magical powers. Then Miles sees a photo of MLK as a kid playing baseball and Miles says "why the fuck NOT steal a revered civil rights leader'  baseball glove?" But as soon as Miles puts it on, Wish Kid-style, he and that country motherfucker are magically transported back to the 1930s. Sure as sugar, they run into 12-year-old MLK, whom Miles describes as "major magic time," which I have to admit, does roll off the tongue rather smoothly. Oddly enough, even though it's Atlanta in the Great Depression, black kids and white kids are playing baseball together, which, I don't know, seems like a bit of a stretch to me. But then a white woman calls Miles "an uppity colored" and tells the white skateboarder kid that if he doesn't clean up his act he'll get fucking lynched.

Miles slips on the glove again and this time around the kids wind up on a train with a teenage Martin Luther King, Jr. King explains how he spent the summer humbly picking tobacco in Connecticut to pay for college, which - to put it mildly - isn't exactly a 100 percent truthful interpretation of what King's ACTUAL youth was like. Then MLK talks about how "whites and coloreds" couldn't associate with one another in the South, while ominous music plays over stock footage of segregated water fountain signs. Then the kids eat dinner with the rest of the King family, and Daddy King is voiced by James Earl Jones, because of course he would. "Don't you think it's cool he's always doing nice things for everybody else?" Miles comments.

Hey, it was either that, or Wayne Williams Junior High.

The kids time-skip once more. Now they're in Montgomery, Ala. for the bus boycott in 1956. And now MLK is voiced by Levar Burton, and we get the NARRATIVE APPROVED Rosa Parks story (which, of course, never brings up the fact that Samuel B. Fuller was already in the process of BUYING the Montgomery bus system), and then we get stock footage of MLK's house getting firebombed. Then a character voiced by Samuel L. Jackson starts rallying the black community to use violence against the honkeys, but MLK tells them to be more like Gandhi instead ... which, uh, means he wants them to hate Africans and sleep with their naked nieces on top of them?

Well, before we can fully digest that peculiar visual, the kids time hop again, and now it's time to relive the Birmingham riots, complete with a montage contrasting cartoons and real people having Dobermans bite their ball sacks and getting hit in the face with fire hoses. The kids end up getting transported back to the modern day, and the next day they watch ANOTHER video about the sit-ins and "Bull" Connor, who is pretty much depicted here as a cross between Hitler and The Penguin. And that's our cue for even MORE footage of black people getting power washed, complete with the very, very debatable suggestion that MLK and JFK formed a partnership for racial justice.

After school, the kids go back to MLK's birth home and convince Whoopi Goldberg to let 'em go back inside and fuck around with the time-space continuum some more. The fat white kid and that know-it-all Hispanic bitch decide to trail 'em and what do you know, all four of them wind up getting sucked back in time to the March on Washington. Oh, and hilariously, the "I Have A Dream" speech is dubbed over, because the King estate actually TRADEMARKED it and make people pay to use it now. That said, you can still have a lot of fun with the scene subbing in your OWN music. Might I suggest "Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)" by W.A.S.P.? Anyhoo, the kids run into their future teacher at the rally, and she talks about MLK representing the "power of one" and "affecting change in everyone we touch" and a whole bunch of other hippie dippie bullshit. 

Then the kids hop forward in time and find newspaper clippings about King's death and act like it's the first time they ever heard he died before and decide to head back in time and STOP MLK FROM GETTING ASSASSINATED. "Sorry, that's way past my curfew," MLK tells the kids when they ask him to travel with them to 1999. But after name dropping Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall enough times, MLK finally decides to travel to Miles' time alongside the rest of the chirrens. Except when Miles and MLK get there, the King birth home is just rubble on the ground and the two white kids are best friends instead of being antagonistic towards each other and oh shit, black kids aren't allowed to ride the school bus anymore. Cue stock footage of KKK marches and "colored only" park benches and MLK starts asking Miles some serious questions about why he thinks *his* timeline is so great again. Now cue MORE stock footage of burning crosses and masses of black people weeping. And, then when the kids get to the middle school, all of a sudden it's been renamed "Robert E. Lee Middle" and the water fountains are segregated again and the principal keeps telling them to "git out" and chides the teachers for being "stupid women." And, oh, that Hispanic girl from earlier? Now she's a street urchin who doesn't know English and polishes floors for a living and Miles' mama is a MAID and he's all pissed that he don't have a Nintendo 64 no more.

So Miles and MLK have to sleep in bags on the floor and then MLK sees his daddy's ghost in the clouds and right then and there he decides he has to go back in time and DIE and keep the continuity loop a goin' as originally planned. And holy shit, they actually SHOW MLK getting shot in Memphis. Well, you have to give 'em some props for having the cojones to put THAT in a children's cartoon. From there we segue to footage from King's funeral, but again, since it originally used quips from the "I Have a Dream" speech, all we have here is just dead audio. Anyway, with everything corrected in the space-time continuum, Miles is able to come back to the modern day and yep, everything is back to normal. And after Miles gets an "A" on his assignment, the kids decide to go feed some homeless people and join Jimmy Carter's Habitats for Humanity and hug crippled black women in wheelchairs while a cover "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" plays in the background. And that, my multicultural brethren, is all there is to it.

Hooray for government-mandated inclusionary policymaking, which totally can't be subverted into civil liberties-eroding power grabs the same way government-mandated exclusionary policymaking was!

Well, I guess that is what it is, isn't it? I guess you don't need me to tell you the historical accuracy in this one was hit and miss, and you REALLY have to question the cartoon's rosy - if not downright messianic - depiction of the good Rev. Dr. King. I mean, it's not like they were ever going to show the alleged homosexual drunken orgies or bring up the fact that a lot of MLK's mentors were avowed communists or anything like that, but they could have at least tried to make the guy seem a little more relatable. After all, the REAL MLK smoked, packed heat, and boned at least one white woman, didn't he?

I suppose in hindsight one may consider Our Friend, Martin one of the great pioneering texts of the ongoing "white guilt" complex in American society - especially for Millennials. Remember, this was shit children were seeing every single year throughout elementary school and junior high, and let's face it - the big, central message the cartoon gets across (rather intentional or planned) is that a.) MLK was so great that everything he said most be taken as the literal social gospel and b.) left unchecked, white men will enslave you again and call your mama bad names. Even if that wasn't the filmmakers' desire, that's just the way hyper-literal children think, and when you have that pounded into your skull over and over for nine years, without a single adult explaining the movie's takeaways in a more nuanced form it can and will leave an indelible stamp on one's psyche - and no amount of factual evidence is likely to surmount the pure emotional pull one has felt since he or she was in kindergarten. The filmmakers may have thought the key idea children took away from the movie was that you shouldn't treat people unfairly because they're different, but instead the central theme they're walking away with is "holy shit, white people were EVIL as fuck back in the day, and if we don't do everything MLK tells us to they'll start treating minorities like doo doo again." Just read the comments on this YouTube upload - virtually none of the top comments are about racial reconciliation, but various shades of the old "boy howdy, the whites sure were MEAN towards blacks back then, and you know what, the probably still want to enslave us" chestnut. Planned, or unplanned, that's the major takeaway easily impressionable children got out of this movie - don't judge people by the color of their skin, except for the white ones, because goddamn, look at all the evil shit they did back in 1950s.

As a history lesson, it's pretty much just brazen hagiography for the ankle-biter set, leaving out all of M.L.K.'s more regrettable character traits and pretty much attributing the entirety of the Civil Rights Movement to his doing (that there isn't a companion video chronicling the animated exploits of Malcolm X is a rather telling example of omission by design.) As a morality play, it's pretty humdrum as well, but come on - it's pro-diversity propaganda intended for first graders. What did you expect? And taken only on its merits as animation, it's passable, but nothing extraordinary. The entire time I was watching the video I just felt like the character designs seemed hauntingly familiar, and sure enough, the IMDB validated my suspicions: it was co-directed by Vincenzo Trippetti, who as fate would have it, also served as a storyboard supervisor for The Real Ghostbusters, Jem and Mummies Alive! Needless to say, if there was ever a production in dire need of a sudden guest appearance by Apep the Snake God, surely it would be this woefully uninvolving cartoon.

As a piece of nostalgic ephemera, I suppose it has its merits. Shit, I didn't even watch the thing when I was a kid and I still smelled my old elementary school's cafeteria and gym mats while I was reviewing it. But more importantly, it stands as a testament to the power of the media - particularly animated programming - as a major social conditioning engineer. Our Friend, Martin is unquestionably a production with the chief goal of dictating morality to its young audience. It has little to do with entertaining them, or even giving them an educational history lesson. Rather, it's a coordinated effort to instill in young viewers the seeds of an adult ethos, one that neatly contours to a particular political ideology and its pre-established dogma.

Is the intent of Our Friend, Martin to encourage children to rebuke collectivist labels and see individuals as precisely that, individuals, or is it meant to goad children into believing a one-dimensional social policy creation myth that clearly paints one half of the U.S. social dyad as born losers and the other half as lapsed ethno-totalitarians?

And if you can't figure out which one, no worries - just show this flick to an eight-year-old and they'll be able to tell you which is which as soon as it's over.

Read More

Why Won't Black Women Date White Guys?

I'll give you a hint: it starts with the letter "r" and rhymes with "tay-cism."

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

For an entire summer, I was madly in lust with Robyn. Yeah, her first name was spelled just like the singer, and thanks to the ravages of time, I totally forgot what her last name was. Harris? Williams? Henderson? Your guess is as good a mine, folks. 

A little background here. I was fresh out of high school and in that weird part of my life where I wasn't totally dead set on going to college quite yet. Needing money but not really looking for a career, I took a job at a local textbook warehouse - where virtually all of the employees were local college kids trying to pick up a little bit of spare change during the summer break. 

Turnover was high. A month in, I was already one of the senior employees due to worker atrophy, so every time a new herd of recruits came in, I was tasked with showing them the ropes. Mostly, this meant teaching them how to look up ISBN numbers on the ancient Tandy computer terminals we had all over the place and the proper way to make "book squares" (the trick? You do five lairs going one way, then another five lairs going the opposite way and you repeat until the damn stack is taller than you are.) 

Robyn was one of my first trainees, and I was smitten by her. She was a couple of years older than me (maybe three or four?) and she had a nice curvy build - about 5'7, 170 pounds, at least half of it ass and titty. She was also kinda-sorta gothy (she always wore this frilly, black cobweb looking blouses like Morticia Addams) and she nailed pretty much all of the semi-skanky quasi-trashy aesthetics I love about a young woman in the 20-to-30 age range: she chain smoked cigarettes, wore an absurd amount of indigo eyeshadow and made sure her lips were constantly coated in a thick, juicy layer of MAC LipGlass (aka, that clear lip balm stuff all the girls used to wear back in the My Chemical Romance era that at least partially resembled a smudge of semen.) Oh, and one more thing: she was black. 

OK, I guess if we were being sticklers for facts, she was more of a medium brown, but you know what I mean. I had never been with a black girl, and being a male who has lived in the American south his whole life, let me tell you - we desperately, direly want to date black girls. I don't care how gruff or menacing or prejudicial the exterior portrait may be, if a white man has genetic roots in Dixie soil, he's molecularly inclined to want to have sex with African-American women. You get a Grand Cyclops drunk enough, and trust me, it won't be long before he starts blurting out how bad he wants to plow Halle Berry's cotton fields, if you catch my drift. Say what you will about white men in the South being culturally predisposed towards anti-black bigotry, I can attest to this: ain't no real Southern man's dick a racist, at least. 

So, back to Robyn. I'd greet her each morning (usually, she was dual wielding a Marlboro and a Styrofoam cup of coffee) and just listen to her yell at her baby's daddy on her cell phone (the kid was two or three, I think.) The thing that struck me about her voluble calls was the tone of her voice. At times, it almost seemed like she trailed away from her "default black girl voice" and drifted into California mallrat tones. I have no idea, but every time her voice cracked and squeaked and she sounded like a white girl from Stockton named Emily or Hanna (with no second "h," naturally), I would get supremely aroused. As in, "having to mask my boner while clocking in" aroused. And if they whole "seductive white girl with a bompin' black body" thing wasn't enough to get my penis blood a flowing, she also smelled absolutely delicious - this super-intoxicating trifecta of cocoa butter, Afrocentric hair product and grape body spray. I may be able to recall my mother's maiden name, but I assure you I will never forget that wondrous little love potion. 

Of course I flirted with Robyn. Being a 130 pound honky with hair down to his rib cage, however, I assumed I wasn't exactly her type. Still, she'd flirt back a little, sometimes even touching my collarbone and mussing my hair. Which brings me to The Sports Page. 

What was The Sports Page? It was this crappy little bar kinda' sorta' close to the factory. On Friday's, we'd go there and pop a few brews (strangely enough, they never bothered checking my ID - even though I was just 20 at the time.) Now, not that I need to tell you this or anything, but the crew was a pretty diverse mix. About 45 percent white, 45 percent black and 10 percent whatever the fuck Ronaldo was. Straight down the middle, a 50/50 male-to-female ratio. I had already made out with three fellow employees (all female) and even received a blow job from one of them (once again, I feel the need to address the giver of said blow job was a woman.) And since we were mostly horny college kids that considered whatever happened that summer to be non-canonical, meaningless sexual trysts weren't just accepted, they were pretty much encouraged.

Even David Duke beats off to this. 

So, one afternoon, I convinced Robyn to join me and about seven other workers for a few drinks. I even gave her a ride in my piece of shit Toyota, which by that point, used more oil than actual gasoline. We get there and we shoot the shit - she pairs up with a nice, multicultural throng of the womenfolks and I buddy up with a nice, multicultural throng of the sausaged set. After a while, a somewhat slurred Robyn waltzed up to me and asked if I wanted to dance. This is especially peculiar, considering the fact that not only was no one else dancing, there wasn't even any music playing at the bar (unless you count the dulcimer tones of Michael Wilbon and Tony fuckin' Kornheiser on Pardon the Interruption as something you want to cut a jig to.) I look over at her gal pals, and they are all egging her on. Great, I must be some kind of lost bet or something. Still, that delightful miasma of grape scented sex in her hair goaded me into action, and we awkwardly fumbled around in front of God and everybody. "Give him so booty!" one of the hoochies across the bar yelled, so Robyn hiked her ass up and started gyrating just inches away from my most assuredly Caucasian whangdoodle. Naturally, my instinctual reaction was to pop the biggest boner of my life up to that point, which without question managed to tickle the back of Robyn's gold-glitter speckled jeans. I look up at table of dudes from work, and every last one of them have a look on their face like I just took a shit in their cervezas. I glance at the girls' table and they look even more pissed. I swear, I saw one of them mouth "this is disgusting" before slamming her wadded up napkin on the table. 

Of course, I didn't pay their reactions any attention. After all, I had a girl I had a major crush on literally grinding her buttchecks into my pecker in public, and I ain't ever going to complain about that. She gave me a big hug after the debacle was over and done with and retreated to the gals's section. I ambled on over to the guy's table, my Johnson still rock hard - shit, I was worried I might knock a table over on the trip back. 

Everybody was quiet. I mean deathly quiet. The white guys wouldn't look me in the eye and the black guys looked like they wanted to beat the shit out of me. And Ronaldo - well, I don't know what the fuck he was thinking, but come on, like anybody gave a shit what Ronaldo thought. About five minutes later, Robyn comes up to the table and meekly asks me if I can give her a ride home. I paid the tab and downed one more nacho chip (this time, without the salsa) and courted Robyn back to the terrible Toyota. 

She lived about five minutes away, so it wasn't that long of a commute. In fact, she lived in an apartment complex that abutted the apartment complex of the very girl who went down on me a few weeks earlier, so I was quite familiar with the environs. She thanked me for the ride, but before she unbuckled her seatbelt, she leaned over towards me. 

"You ever been with a black girl before?" she posed. 

The answer, of course, was that I hadn't. But considering I was still kinda' liberal back then, I mulled whether saying that could be construed as racist. So, as would any sort with his salt, I just stammered and said nothing. 

"I just gotta' say, I think you're really cute and sweet," she responded. "And if I was a white girl, I'd totally date you." (Keep this line in the back of your head - it's central to the whole damn premise of the article.) 

I was embarrassed/nervous to high heavens. Do I tell her I think she's cute, too, or that I really, really liked the last Geto Boys album and had seen Shaft's Big Score at least five times? I didn't even notice her lacquering her mouth up with that translucent lip goo. 

"If you want, you can gimme' a guh-night kizz," she said. I had to spell it like that because I honestly had no idea what she was saying at the time. I honestly thought she asked me if I wanted a "gonad kit," which I presumed was a very popular dessert in the regional African-American community. It wasn't until she cupped her hand under my chin and started pulling me towards her puckered maw that I realized what she trying to get at - that's right, robbing me. 

That was the first - and so far - only time I've ever had a black girl's lips laced over my own. And it was awesome. Her lips were so puffy and succulent that it felt like I was slurping on four sets of smackers instead of just two. I thought it was just about the most amazing thing in the world - that is, until she crammed her tongue down my esophagus. No, I don't mean that as a euphemism for French kissing, I mean her tongue was so big and long that it literally jabbed me in the uvula and I thought I was going to puke down her throat, which conceivably could've been considered a hate crime. Rather, I gutted it out and tried to pretend I was in the throes of passion while she tried to impregnate my mouth, Alien style. After a good 30 second galocher, she wiped the excess spit and lip gel off her face, opened the car door, and with a downright sing-song intonation, lilted "and if you think that felt good, you ought to feel my pussy." She laughed, closed the door, and said see you Monday. I then went home, my tonsils still bruised and swollen from her literal tongue lashing, and proceeded to jerk my monkey thinking about her no less than three times over a four hour timeframe. Hey - I earned this one.

...because, as we all know, telling a black woman what kind of dick she is allowed to have is the exact OPPOSITE of "racism."

So things are all fine and dandy, but on Monday morning, she's nowhere to be seen (even though her car was there.) That was literally the first time she didn't greet me outside smoking, swigging a coffee and trying to get child support payments. We finally rendezvous in aisle 10 (that's where we kept the middle school biology textbooks) and she wouldn't so much as look me in the eye. Yeah, a pretty big turnaround from frantically tongue kissing me the last time we were in each other's company, I'd say. I said hello, and she let out a very passive aggressive "hey" and kept sliding books around like Tetris pieces. About an hour later, another African-American coworker gently-but-not-that-gently bumped up against me and bluntly told me "it's a good idea to stay away from our women." Since he was wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers shirt at the time, I initially thought he was talking about Steelers fans, but after catching yet ANOTHER sinister glare from yet another black employee - you know, the kind of look like I just performed half the Johnny Rebel discography in front of a burning cross - it slowly dawned on me what was happening. 

I don't know how much the other people at the warehouse knew, but they knew enough that we both kinda' wanted to make some sweet, sweet caramel in the sack, if you catch my drift. And this being before Obama ended any and all racial divisiveness in our country for good, this whole romantic racial intermingling didn't precisely sit while with my black or white brethren (I still don't know what Ronaldo's opinion was, and quite frankly, I don't give a shit neither.)

Here's the thing. My white coworkers were a bit miffed at me for my amorous interracial interactions, but they never actually said anything about it. They were more passive aggressive - you know, just not saying anything at all to me - while the blacks were very, very vocal about my "infringements." I got a text from Robyn after work, saying she didn't want to talk to me anymore. The reason? All the other African-American warehouse workers were giving her too much shit about booty dancing with a white boy (and had they known about our spit-swapping escapade, they probably would've gone Turner Diaries on our asses.) I didn't even respond, and we never spoke again. And without that surname, I can't even stalk her on Facebook and surreptitiously jack off to her public photos - a real bummer, I know. 

Now, I told you all of that to tell you this. I catch shit from time to time because some people think I'm some kind of alt-right Neo-Nazi racist simply because I write about white supremacist propaganda (primarily, to make fun of it) and have the gall to call #BLM and their ilk out for hypocritical bullshit, like when they demand their universities codify actual racial segregation and they get popped by the po-po for owning honest-to-goodness actual slaves. Well, folks, I can tell you this - I don't think whites are inherently superior to black people. In fact, my poor-ass upbringing actually gives me a closer bond with African-American culture than it does Albinoid American artifacts, and my public admiration of Malcolm X, Booker T. Washington and Diff'rent Strokes more than backs up my argument. Hell, I co-habitated with an African-American in college for two years and have been paid to write articles about real racism in African-American journals (for real, yo.) So if I'm a "racist," I'm that really liberal kind that's totally cool with black-on-white French kissin', A-OK signing a lease agreement with members of the African-American community and proudly supports a team so idiosyncratically black even our punter is a brutha. What I'm trying to get at here is a crass and crude double standard when it comes to white/black relationships in these United States. For all the hubbub we hear about whitey being racist, from my own personal experiences, the honkeys I've hooked up with are supportive of miscegenation, or at the very least, tolerant enough of it that they won't make a big fuss out of it in public. And even if they do hold some prejudice against romance a'la Oreo, a good 99 percent of 'em are too guldarn scared to say anything about it, because they KNOW that would get them branded with the Scarlet "R" and they'd get fired and lose their house and have to live out of an R.V. or something.

The thing the media doesn't have the guts to tell you is that - point blank - black people in the U.S. are generally more prejudiced against white people than the other way around, especially when it comes to interracial intercourse. Sure, you can show me Pew data from four years ago that forgets to tell you upfront they count Asians and Hispanics as "white" to argue to the contrary, but trust me - as a person who lives in a state with the largest number of blacks anywhere in the U.S., I can tell you how it really is. 

Now, are there really prudish old-ass white people out there who consider race-mixing a sin on par with bestiality? Yeah, but their numbers are so infinitesimal as to be irrelevant; besides, those fuckers are either so old or so culturally isolated that their impact on prevailing social norms is about as profound as a butterfly's fart during a Raiders home game.

The frank reality is that there's a lot more stigma in the black community about interracial dating than there is in the white community (although, to be perfectly honest, I think the terms "the [insert absurdly reductionistic group here] community" are non-existent segregatory labels concocted by white and black opportunists alike to promote their own rancorous, ethnocentric agendas.) Every white guy I've ever met - yes, even the yokels I grew up with who said the word "nigger" more than the articles "a," an" and "the" - has at least shown some kind of personal approval of black-on-white dalliances - if not for general society, at least for them and their own dicks. I'd venture to guess that a good 95 percent of white people in America don't give a hoot about race-mixing, and of the five percent that are adamantly opposed, I'm guessing at least half of them still jack off pictures of Gabrielle Union and K.D. Aubert on the downlow. But within the general black community - ESPECIALLY when it comes to black woman/white man lovin' - there's still a considerable amount of discomfort over the matter.

Now that's what I call "tolerance!"

The reports don't lie - for whatever reason, black women (in particular, college-educated ones) are absolutely aghast at the idea of getting their wombs nice and spermed by anyone who ISN'T the same color they are. The idea of shacking up with a white dude - by and large - is seen as some form of race betrayal, with black women into honky dong oft considered the post-Obama equivalent of Uncle Toms (err, Aunt Toms, I guess.)

But don't take my word for it - just listen to what Stanford professor Ralph Richard Banks had to say about the root causes of why college-educated black women are so hesitant to give vanilla a try:

"...there is still enormous social pressure on black women to only marry black men — to 'sustain' the race and build strong black families. And this means marrying black men even if they are less educated or earn less money. In short, no matter the personal cost, black women are encourage to marry 'down' before they marry 'out.'"

Sweet mayonnaise on a whole grain cracker, can you imagine the reaction a white woman would get for saying the exact same thing about black dudes? Old blue eyes would be drug out of her house at midnight by her golden locks and prolly sacrificed in the town square for mass linguistic hate homicide. 

So loathe to being loved and embraced and taken care of be a white man, scores and scores of black women VOLUNTARILY elect to marry and breed with practically random black men simply for the sake of maintaining "racial pride." That's LITERALLY the exact same supremacist ideology you'd hear over at The Daily Stormer or whatever Paul Kersey's working on nowadays, but for some reason, nobody in the general public ever raises a stink about it. Let's just come on out and say it, folks: black women won't date white men because - deep down - THEY are racist as fuck. They put arbitrarily-designated racial in-group pride over their own physiological, financial and most distressing of all, emotional wants because that herd identity, apparently, means more to them than their own personal happiness. The mass black consciousness they allow to supercede their own desires, dictating not only their wombs, but their very hearts. What kind of individual life can you have when you feel THAT indebted and tethered to in-group conformity at all times? Prolly not a very enjoyable one - indeed, one could almost say that this rigid adherence to ethnic cultural norms represents a kind of ideological neo-slavery. If it's horrid and backwards and destructive when displayed by white identitarians, then why don't we call a ... shovel ... a shovel and label this individual squelching black identitarianism, which is so despotic that it forces people to reject pure love for another human being on account of him needin' way more sunscreen, as the hateful, bigoted ideology it actually is? 

How weird is it that the P.O.C. at the vanguard of the multicultural movement are also the ones least likely to date outside their own ethnicity and Crayola shade?  Indeed, the white boyfriend taboo alone ought to be enough to get you to see "intersectionality" as the scam and scheme it is. "We celebrate diversity in all its manifestations," the loud and the proud Black African-American Cis-Women of Color (or BAACWOCs, for short) cheerfully clamor, "you know, just as long as it isn't within our reproductive orifices."

On some sleepless nights, when I can hear that morose little pitter patter of raindrops on my windowsill, I think about Robyn and what could have been had the local "black community" not been so damned racist. Who knows? Maybe me and Robyn would've fallen in love and we would've moved in together and decided to get married and have some beautiful toffee-colored children of our own. But no, African-American society thinks that's "culturally unacceptable" because it cheats the black race out of another full-blooded black baby, and their crude ethnocentrist nationalism has to lord over everybody like P.C.-age plantation whip crackers.

How dreadful it must be to be a woman of color in these disunited states, stuck in a racially prejudiced subculture that not only expects BUT demands ethnic supremacism reigns over your every thought and action. Forget about the alleged tyranny of the white patriarchy, the intersectionalist dogma you fearfully force yourself to abide by is doing MUCH more to de-individualize you and goad you into involuntary behavior - indeed, one may even consider such to constitute a form of ideological bondage. 

And at the end of the day, THAT's why black women, even in our super-duper wonderful multiculturalism uber alles utopia, STILL have an aversion to courting, marrying and reproducing with white males. So hateful the racial nationalism coursing through their veins that they've convinced themselves that simply loving another human being makes somebody a bona fide in-group deserter and a biological Benedict Arnold. So maddened by learned hatred of the white man that they consider merely admiring and appreciating a Caucasoid male to be a cultural perversion - an unthinking, illogical form of prejudice every bit as contemptible as the anti-black hatred spewed by a Klansman or the homophobic spoutings of a Neo-nazi. 

Of course, good luck getting anybody in today's America to say anything about this flagrant Albanophobia running rampant throughout black culture, particularly the domain populated by college-educated women of color.

Hate explains a lot, y'know - and unfortunately, that appears to explain why black women won't even consider giving the time of day to old Paleface.

Read More

This Week in Social Justice Warrior-Dom

A fond look back at all the things that had ultra-P.C. jihadists OUTRAGED ... before they forget all about them just a week later.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

Racism is absolutely NOT TOLERATED (except...)

One of the great truths of reality/adulthood you have to accept - sooner or later - is the idea that "freedom" and "equality" are totally incompatible ideals. Granted, you can have absolute, unfettered freedom (i.e., the ability to do whatever the hell you want and make money off of it, just as long as you aren't committing crimes in the process) but it comes at the expense of egalitarianism - meaning, the haves are pretty much given free rein to run roughshod over the have-nots, who, in the absence of some overarching governmental superstructure, are left to their own devices to thrive and survive (of course, whether or not that's a long overdue policy shift or a genocidal act, naturally, depends on your own personal perspective.) The flip side to that, however, is that in a state of true equality, no such thing as "liberty" - i.e., the personal right to pursue whatever one desires, profit off one's sojourns and be left the hell alone - can ever possibly exist. To guarantee "equal opportunities," you would have to erect the most massive, oppressive totalitarian regime in the history of humanity, an Orwellian nightmare that intrudes into virtually every aspect of social life. We're talking massive wealth redistribution, affirmative action on steroids, a deluge of new taxes and some sort of towering governmental agency that makes sure the socioeconomic playing field remains level at all times. Logically, this means the best course of action is to strive for some sort of compromise - in essence, a social system that incorporates some equality-insuring measures, but not so many that it allows governments to literally pick and choose who succeeds or fails financially and deprives citizens of their basic human rights to think whatever the fuck they want to think without fear of being exiled to the gulags. 

And that's where America's favorite hot button social issue comes into play - good old fashioned, insanely-hard-to-technically-define racism. 

Now, we here at The Internet Is In America have talked about racism (and especially the media's infatuation with perpetuating it as an issue that, indeed, may not be as omnipresent as they suggest) until we are collectively blue in the face. What continues to fascinate me, however, is just how selective the media is when it comes to publicizing "racist incidents" to the masses. In short? For whatever reason, the stewards of media seem suspiciously hell-bent on showcasing stories about white individuals saying and doing racist things, but at the same time, they also seem hell-bent on steering clear of any and all episodes and incidents of black people saying undeniably racist things about white folks. 

Case in point? The unabashed "agenda-setting" mechanism sometimes called Twitter put a story about a Belmont University freshman declaring several members of the Philadelphia Eagles to be - and I quote - "piece of shit niggers" who "deserve "a damn bullet in the head"  - front and center on their website. As in, of all the major global events going on in the world - the war in Syria, the presidential election, the fact that some guy tried to blow up people in New York over the weekend and Wells Fargo being embroiled in the biggest financial institution scam since the Great Recession - played second fiddle to this extremely isolated, niche-interest non-story that, quite frankly, personally impacts no one BESIDES the person who got ousted from his university for posting the comments online. Keep in mind, this wasn't some organically driven topic main-paged because of the company's hashtag algorithms - somebody at Twitter literally decided that this story should take utmost primacy over ALL OTHER WORLDLY doings, with no other clear-cut motivation other than to turn the incredibly insignificant trifle (and yes, compared to millions of people living in slavery in India, Venezuela on the cusp of revolution and Zimbabwe citizens slowly starving to death because of Robert Mugabe's insanity, it IS an incredibly insignificant, trifling issue) into something that would have people across the globe yammering on and on about - what else? - that darned old specter of racism that continues to loom large in the United States. 

Of course, never mind the fact that international polls reveal United States people to be the least racist peoples on the planet. Never mind the fact that there hasn't been a single recorded lynching in the United States since 1981. And definitely never mind the fact that, in these United States, black people are 500 percent likelier to violently attack, rape or kill white people than the other way around. What I want to know is, how come a story about some dickhead at a Christian university getting expelled because he said the dreaded "n" word and made a vague - yet technically First Amendment protected - threat against people because he didn't like their personal actions became a mass-media-promoted, international news item while none of the incidents or episodes below remained local and regional level stories?

Why wasn't it international news when a Sandra Bland protester said "you mother-fuckers thought we should be killed when ya'll came and stole us from Africa and put us in chains and murdered us for over 400 years, so yeah, you do need to die?"

Why wasn't it international news when a 21-year-old student upset over the Laquan McDonald shooting threatened to waltz into the University of Chicago and kill 16 white males "to do my part to rid the world of white devils?"

Why wasn't it international news when an Economic Freedom Fighters Student Command senior official in South Africa said "Fuck white people. Just get me a bazooka or AK-47 so I can do the right thing and kill these demon possessed humans?"

Why wasn't it international news when Black Lives Matter activists proudly declared "we should never affirm white life" during a Harvard debate?

Why wasn't it international news when a black student assaulted a white student at San Francisco State University because she thought his dreadlocks were racist?

Why wasn't it international news when Corey Batey raped a 21-year-old woman, explaining his actions as "that's for 400 years of slavery, you bitch?"

Honestly, I have nary a clue, other than the fact that the mainstream news outlets - and yes, let's face it, Facebook and Twitter have just as much culture-framing power as CNN and The New York Times, if not substantially more so - desperately, direly want to keep the great U.S. race debate extraordinarily one-sided, with whites always the clear-cut oppressors and blacks always the clear-cut victims. Whether that's for the sake of sensationalism or to achieve some underhanded political goal, I'm not sure, but regardless of the reasoning, there's no denying that the media powers-that-be are irrationally, suspiciously averse to any sort of coverage that dare insinuates that, golly gee, honkies can be the victims of racist oppression, just as much as the black folks, and sweet sufferin' succotash, black folks can be just as dogmatically and illogically prejudiced as their mayonnaise-hued brethren.  

And really, where's the equality in that, guys? 

Time to reset the "Great Racial War of 2016" clock...

It's been a couple of weeks since the U.S. of A has had itself a good-old fashioned racial riot, so thank goodness the fine, upstanding citizens of North Carolina decided to break up all of that "domestic tranquility" monotony in the wake of the police-involved shooting of Keith Scott - certainly not the monstrous type of brute to have a restraining order taken out against him because he threatened to kill his entire household in 2015 - who was just reading a book when some damned old racist police man waltzed on over to him and filled him with hot lead, because white supremacy, that's why. Of course, it means precious little that Scott did indeed have a stolen firearm on him at the time of his death, nor does it matter one iota that the police officer who fired the lethal shot was himself an African-American ... once you've got a good narrative a spoolin', why let pesky, troublesome things like "facts" and "reality" ruin the fiction you've convinced yourself is god-given truth? As anticipated, in the wake of the shooting the streets of Charlotte became a sort of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome urban warzone, with predominantly black protesters proudly engaging in their constitutionally protected right to peaceably assemble ... which lasted all of about, I don't know, five minutes before demonstrators started shooting each other, reporters started getting punched live on air, white people were being dragged into parking lots and mercilessly pummeled in six on one maulings, dozens of people started tossing rocks and explosives at police cruisers and transfer trucks were being set on fire and looted on the Interstate. Of course, rather than acknowledge the absurd and undeniably racist notion that some of these "demonstrators" don't give a shit about public policy reform and are just there to royally fuck shit up under the false pretense of moral righteousness, the mainstream media/social media masses continue to cook up the same old halfhearted excuses and deflections - usually, by means of the ironically super racist reasoning that after being deprived for so long, what options does the black community have other than unfettered, unrestrained mass mob violence? Meanwhile, the CNNs and Huffington Posts of the world have done an outstanding job shying away from an altogether different story - this one, involving the brutal slaying of Caucasian cop Kenneth Steil at the hands of African-American murderer Marquise Cromer. Funny how when the shoe is slipped on the proverbial other foot, you don't get any of the same collateral unpleasantness - the broken windows, the public beat-downs, the burning cop cars, and that marvelous scent of tear gas and freshly spilled plasma filling the evening air - isn't it? Hell, maybe the police ought to start rioting whenever one of their arbitrarily defined select in-group members get gunned down - naturally, using the "well, they victimized us first!" rationale for setting an entire metropolitan statistical area on fire. 

Remember kids: it's not really racism
unless the person you beat half to death
actually dies. 

New study reveals majority of Americans - of all races - do not believe being "prejudiced" makes you a "bad person"

Remember a couple years back, when I made the downright insane suggestion that, while "racism" may be bad, it's certainly not as bad as other things, like rape, murder and abandoning your children? Well, as it turns out, my downright unconscionable hypothesis appears to have been validated by, of all things, The Huffington Post. In a YouGov poll conducted Sept. 10 - 12, 1,000 U.S. adults were asked, point blank, if they believed that people who held the incredibly ill-defined "negative views" of Muslims, black people, gays (but strangely enough, not lesbians or transgenders), women or immigrants were, and I quote, "a bad person." Now, one can - and most certainly should - have some reservations about the usage of such incredibly subjective, abstract and non-scientific terms like "bad person" and "negative views" in said study, but the results were nonetheless interesting. In all, the range of respondents who thought someone who fostered "negative views" of the aforementioned special interests group ran only 10 to 16 percent, while the total number of respondents who said fostering such views may be prejudiced, but don't necessarily makes someone a "bad person" ran the gamut from 51 to 59 percent. And perhaps most intriguingly, the total number of respondents who said that fostering a personal disliking of any of the "protected classes" listed above didn't make someone a bad person nor prejudicial, definitionally, ran from 23 to 32 percent of all respondents. Drilling down into the meat of the data, however, reveals some truly unexpected results. As it turns out, just 19 percent of Hispanic poll takers thought individuals who fostered unfavorable thoughts about immigrants were unquestionably bad people, while 21 percent of Hispanic respondents thought that didn't make people "bad" or prejudicial (and by the way, 37 percent of black respondents agreed with that assertion, compared to 28 percent of white respondents.) And hey, speaking of the arbitrarily-defined African American contingent, hold on to your hats, folks, 'cause barely a quarter of black respondents said they thought disliking black people automatically made someone a bad person, compared to 21 percent who said it didn't make them bad or prejudiced and a whopping 46 percent who said it may make someone prejudicial, but being prejudicial still doesn't necessarily mean a person is "bad."

So what's the big takeaway from all of this? Maybe - just maybe - a plurality of Americans, no matter their age, race, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, region, socioeconomic status or political identification - just don't give that much of a fuck if people are bigots are not. Which, of course, means it's the media's job to continue to stir the proverbial shit pot over and over and over again until all of us dim, unenlightened folks realize the error of our ways. 

Cracked finally goes into full-SJW mode and publishes questionable "satire" condemning the alt-right

Two of the saddest "cuckenings," if you will, that I've witnessed over the last couple of  years have been the slow, painful deterioration of the formerly outstanding websites Snopes and Cracked into unabashed, pro-P.C., hyper-liberal sounding boards. The same way what was once our favorite go-to-source for debunking outlandish chain e-mail claims was absolutely ruined by avowed liberal feminist Kim Lacapria, Cracked has surely but slowly devolved from a perspective-neutral comedy site highlighted by the keen, apolitical observations of bona-fide humorists like Sean Baby and John Cheese into a ranting, raving, anti-anti-SJW skein of fuming liberal resentment masquerading as culturally conscious parody. Perhaps an effort to out-victimize Time columnist Joel Stein, Cracked scribe Robert Evans - who, in the past has published glaringly brazen character assassination jobs disguised as humor, to the point of putting absurdly sensationalist, ridiculously untrue assertions in the freakin' HEADLINES of his articles (hate to break it to you, kiddo, but there hasn't been an actual Nazi walking around God's green earth since 1945) - took a big fat shit on the Internet with his reverse magnum opus "5 Things You Learn Being Attacked By The Alt-Right," published/shat out Sept. 20. Among the highlights of Evans' utterly humorless cry-for-help?

• He trudges up the online harassment experienced by Leslie Jones, Jessica Valenti and Allison Rapp ... without mentioning Jones' long string of anti-white comments, the fact that Valenti has never presented tangible proof of any rape threats against her child or the fact that Rapp was shit-canned by Nintendo not because she was being targeted by online haters, but because she was an open supporter of pedophilia working for a toy company ... who, oh yeah, was also moonlighting as a high-end prostitute.
• He refers to Breitbart and thedonald subreddit as "openly Nazi forums" no different than Stormfront.
• He says the alt-right has a "distinctly anti-female vibe" ... yet completely overlooks the vicious, misogynistic death threats Sandernistas sent to Nevada' s Democratic Party Chairwoman Roberta Lange.
• He assails "racist" websites like The Council for Concerned Citizens for inspiring "thousands of psychopaths to ruin people's lives" ... just paragraphs after excoriating the alt-right for their alleged "Islamaphobic" fear-mongering.
• He insinuates, without any formal statistical data, that half of Trump's supporters are bona fide white supremacists.
• He accuses the "alt right" of employing tactics to "effectively silence" their political opponents ... which, of course, is something the Cntrl Left never, EVER practices. 
• To demonstrate just how ghastly and dangerous the ill-defined "alt-right" is, he trudges up the harassment experienced by conservative strategist Rick Wilson, who indeed found threatening notes at his private residence ... that was apparently put there by a fervid Bernie Sanders supporter. 

So what's the point of Evans' meandering, hypocritical, fantastically fallacious screed? Well, considering the incredible amount of unprovable conjecture and flat out lies contained therein, it's most certainly not to inform, and with its grave, alarmist tone, it most definitely isn't intended to entertain, either. Indeed, Evans little tirade is nothing more than brass-balled SJW propaganda, through and through, with the only palpable takeaway being the fact that this kid is mighty miffed that - have mercy - other people are now doing the same thing his ideological kin have being doing for decades. And you know what makes him the maddest about that? The fact that, quite frankly, the dastardly, dangerous "alt right" miasma is doing a much better job applying the merciless, opposition-squelching tactics pioneered by the vaunted, venerable forefathers of the political correctness movement half a century ago than his liberal contemporaries could ever possibly fathom. 

President of students' union says college is "psychologically destructive" because it forces students to learn about white people ... and somehow, that's still not the craziest thing she believes

Malia Bouattia, 28, is the first National Union of Students president to be female, black and Muslim at the same time. That last part is an important distinction, because as we all know, mouth-foaming identity politics is the best - nay, THE ONLY way - to bring about post-racial harmony, from sea to shining sea. In a recent interview with The Guardian, she recently took the U.K. higher education system to task, stating "when we look at the incredibly Eurocentric curriculum, where people don't see themselves in what they're studying, and can't relate to it, and feel that their European counterparts hit the ground running, they can't see themselves advancing in the subjects ... and have they had a positive experience, being forced to engage with content that doesn't relate to them, and perhaps is psychologically destructive?"

Now, never mind the logical shortcomings of Bouattia's argument (for one thing, no one is "forced to engage with content," seeing as how you have the option to choose which classes you participate in and can always drop out of them - and I'm pretty sure the courses are "Eurocentric" because, get this, THE U.K. IS IN FUCKING EUROPE.) And never mind that, using Bouattia's logic, white students shouldn't have to undergo any diversity workshops or multiculturalism-espousing courses because, in her own words "being forced to engage with content that doesn't relate to them" is "psychologically destructive." Instead, let's take a look at Bouattia's own remarks during her tenure in the NUS. The highlights?

• She called for prisons to be abolished because they are, in her view, both "sexist and racist."
• She called for the U.K. government to eliminate its counter-extremism prevention strategy, stating that youths at potential risk of radicalization would be better served by taxpayer subsidized youth centers and "job opportunities." 
• She refused to issue a formal condemnation of ISIS' terrorist activities, declaring such to be a "justification for war and blatant Islamophobia" ...
• ... all while maintaining that she isn't anti-Semitic, despite referring to her own university as, and again, I quote, "a Zionist outpost." 

So, yeah, seems to me this Bouattia broad is the perfect person to speak out about the "psychological destruction" of academia. After all, she does appear to be the one leading the charge, don't she? 

California prepares the next generation of engineers, doctors, lawyers and politicians by telling them the word "edgy" is a hate crime ... and then they give them ball pits to play in

It's no surprise that colleges in the U.S. nowadays have been pretty much held hostage at gunpoint by the barons of political correctness. Indeed, this state-funded, taxpayer-subsidized Tao of inclusivity, diversity and multiculturalism has more or less become a bona fide government-mandated religion, with university "diversity officers" effectively serving as the hybrid high priest/SS commanders of our one truly perfect ideology. Naturally, the point of this new-wave (anti)liberalism isn't to free the minds of our gilded youth and inspire them to be high achievers, but indeed turn them into staunch Red Guards constantly on the prowl for excuses to explain away their own failures and shortcomings as individuals. Examples of the mass infantilization and cognitive sterilization of America's college-aged youths abound (the University of Houston's diversity officer vying for a non-existent "emotional safety kit" for students, Florida State advisers suggesting the American flag be replaced by the #BlackLivesMatter banner, the University of Minnesota instructing its librarians to report any "microaggressions" they overhear, etc.) but it's going to be difficult finding one as on the nose as a recent episode at California State University-Northridge, which dedicated an entire week to campus events revolving around their ongoing "inclusive language" campaign. During the festivities (which cost state taxpayers a good $1,000), students were invited to spin a wheel and "discuss their feelings" about a litany of terms and phrases, with the endgame, apparently, being to teach students to consider fairly innocuous words and sayings like "man up," "crazy," "ditzy," "edgy" and even 100 percent factual descriptions like "bi-polar" and "illegal immigrant" as unutterables on the same level as "bitch," "whore, "slut" and "fag." But that - believe it or not - isn't the most lamentable thing about the squandering of public monies. No, that would be the fact that CSU-N actually went out and rented a ball pit - charmingly rechristened as a "vent tent" - for its adult students to play in during the week-long series. Because nothing, I suppose, says "we truly value you as the next great leaders of America" quite like treating them like literal special-ed children. 

An update on a police-involved homicide the media - for some reason - didn't want to discuss

Nope. No racial tribalism on display here.
None, whatsoever.

Unless you've been living under a rock (no offense to real crustaceans who actually live under rocks ... we here at IIIA never want to be deemed "arthropodphobic"), you've probably heard quite a bit about the shooting death of Alfred Okwera Olango - who, depending on which website you are visiting, was either having an epileptic attack or, perhaps due to some developmental or behavioral disorder, decided to point his vaping instrument in "a shooting stance" - by El Cajon, Calif. police officers. As has been the case with practically every police-involved shooting involving an unarmed black person since 2014, the cable news juggernaut and social media Wehrmacht went into a tizzy over the episode, with - of course - prolonged, 100 percent peaceful protests dragging out over the better part of a week. While the facts of that particular incident are being pieced together, the media-sphere has all but ignored another police-involved shooting - this one, involving two officers in Louisiana who fatally gunned down an autistic 6-year-old child. Indeed, the two officers, Derrick Stafford and Norris Greenhouse, were recently formally charged with homicide for their part in the Nov. 2015 death of Jeremy Mardis, a kindergarten-aged passenger in father Christopher Few's vehicle. While Few managed to survive being shot several times by the policemen, his six-year-old son wasn't so lucky - according to investigators, the teeny-tiny tot was riddled with five bullets from officers who claimed they didn't know there was a second person in the car. Well, a judge in late September released footage from the incident, and it didn't take long for him to throw the book at Greenhouse and Stafford. Not only did the presiding judge say that they used excessive force (no shit), they never even had a valid reason for pulling over Few in the first place (in fact, not only did Few not attempt to sideswipe their cruiser, like the officers stated, Few didn't even have any active warrants out for his arrest.) And making things even worse? At the time of Few's shooting, he clearly, unmistakably, had his hands in the air. Naturally, one wonders why the Huffington Posts and CNNs and BuzzFeeds and especially the more adamant #BlackLivesMatter organizations haven't hopped all over the case, as it's just about the most blatant, cut-and-dry example of unquestionable police brutality any of us will likely ever see. Surely, the nation's anti-police, pro-social justice masses aren't avoiding the case because it involves two black officers killing a white child and as such lacks an easily exploitable race-baiting angle to their benefit, right? 

This week's top ten black-on-white violent crime countdown!

Yes, I know, it's a stat I, too, get tired of repeating, but as the great British journalist C.P. Scott famously remarked, "comment is free, but facts are sacred." And - as much as we hate it and don't want to think about it - the hard, F.B.I. data tells us, point-blank, that in the U.S. of A, black people are five times likelier to commit a violent crime against a white person than become the victim of a violent crime at the hands of white people - a rather astonishing feat, seeing as how there are approximately five times as many white people in the U.S. than there are black people. As such, The Internet Is In America feels it is both our journalistic and civic obligation to recap all of the strangely under-reported black-on-white crime that transpires in America - but because we're kind of morbid assholes, we choose to do so in a sardonic, Casey Kaseem-inspired countdown format. And with those caveats out of the way, whose ready to get on with the LITERAL honkey bashing (and raping, and torturing, and murdering?)

10. On Sept. 13, 44-year-old Marc LaQuon Payne drove his car through a gas station in an apparent (read: obvious) attempt to murder three police officers gathered outside the QuikTrip (who, as fate would have it, were all white.) While all three officers sustained injuries (one had a broken leg and another was hospitalized over night), amazingly, none of them died in the heinous (hate?) crime. Payne - who was arrested 20 years ago for trying to fist fight officers during a traffic stop - is now staring down three counts of attempted homicide, and hopefully, won't be seeing the light of day for a long time to come.

09. In a small city south of London, an unnamed 15-year-old girl was brutally mauled by a gang of five other teenage girls on Sept. 13. The victim, who was allegedly attacked because she refused to help the gang attack another girl, had her skull cracked open and received two black eyes. Of course, kids being kids these days, the attackers uploaded the brutal beatdown to the Internet, because man, what a great way to not get arrested for trying to stomp a minor to death. 

08. On Sept. 23, a man was attacked in a New York deli by a knife-wielding man who police say made several "anti-white" remarks before slashing an innocent, 40-year-old bystander. The suspect - is seen in the security camera footage here - remains on the lam. 

07. On Sept. 20, Jonathan Brenton, 48, was found shot to death in his Jacksonville, Fla. home. Police suspect the homicide is anything but a coincidence, as he was set to testify against Jecorian McCray, who is on trial for burglarizing Brenton's home earlier this year. McCray and his brother (the potential gunman?) are known to be good friends with Brenton's daughter, who was hospitalized at a drug recovery program at the time of the first robbery. So yeah ... you can fill in the blanks there, I suppose. 

06. In Lehigh, N.Y., 28-year-old Terrell Barclay turned himself into police approximately four months after he killed three people - including Ashlee Mosher, 29, and Amanda Martin, 26 - in a drunk driving "mishap." According to police, Barclay's BAC was more than double the legal limit and he was traveling upwards of 100 miles per hour at the time of the fiery accident. Barclay - who was hideously burned in the accident - spent two months in a coma, only to have fled from police the moment he awoke.

05. Police in Oklahoma City are on the lookout for 35-year-old David Steven Blair, who last April, killed three people - including a two-year-old child - in a wrong-way I-35 collision. While hospitalized for his injuries, officials found PCP, marijuana and benzodiazepam in his system. He has been on the lam ever since he was formally charged with a three separate counts of second-degree murder. 

04. On Sept. 22, 67-year-old Charles Dukes was found dead in a secluded field in Jackson, Miss., apparently the victim of a fatal gunshot to the back of his head. Police arrested Rashaun Crowley and Kenjarell Thomas four days later for their part in the capital homicide. I'll let you determine for yourself what's worse: that it was the city's 50th murder of the year so far or that one of the murder suspect is just 16-years-old. 

03. It takes a really big man to stab a 71-year-old, dependent on an oxygen machine, no less, to death in a home invasion. And apparently, even a task that simplistic was too much for accused murderer Aaron Lee Pearson, a 23-year-old charged with killing Norman Hall earlier this month in the suburbs of Louisville, Ky. Per police, an unnamed juvenile female also helped Pearson carry out the task, because man, is it ever the workout butchering a defenseless septuagenarian, apparently. It's a lot sadder - and sicker - when you learn that the murderous duo wound up killing a senior citizen for what was effectively less than $500 in stolen goods. 

02. On Sept. 20, 54-year-old Kevin Reid was shot and killed during an armed robbery on the streets of Savannah, Ga. According to police, he and his wife were attacked by "three black males," who, as of publication time, remain on the lam. The murder is the 42nd of the year for the coastal Georgia city, which last year, posted 53 total homicides - a sum surpassing the annual state-wide homicides of Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire combined.

...and the no. 1 instance of black people committing horrific crimes against white people goes to...

01. ...18-year-old Perry James Ford of Pensacola, Fla.! He recently turned himself into police for his part in the slaying of Carolyn Barnes in her own home Sept. 10. And if that sounds, I don't know, a little vanilla, please keep in mind that the victim was 75-years-old. While specifics on how or why Ford (allegedly) offed the senior citizen remain under wraps, we do know that Ford already had a warrant out for grand theft, "uttering a forged instrument" and was considered armed and dangerous by the local P.D. No word yet from President Obama on whether or not if he had a son, he would look a lot like Perry James Ford, though. 

[NOTE: And if for some reason all of the factually indisputable incidents listed above have upset you, please do remember that The Internet Is In America is more than willing to publish any user-submitted content effectively and accurately constituting the converse of 'This Week in Social Justice Warrior-dom,' i.e., a similar "This Week in Alt-Right Racist Bullshit" column. If you're willing to write it, we're willing to take a gander at it, and if it's truthful, entertaining and written in at least halfway legible English, we'll post it. Feel free to send your submissions here, kids! - THX, MGMT.]

YouTube unveils new reporting system that in no way, shape or form could ever be weaponized for political censorship

For years and years, YouTube was the proverbial Wild West of the Internet, the last, untainted frontier were people could say whatever the hell they wanted, to whoever the hell they wanted, without having to worry about any consequences whatsoever. Death threats, rape threats, racial slurs, misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia, cooking recipes, it was all pretty much fair game. Alas, the video service included a built-in mechanism that helped deter the especially caustic comments - rather simplistically, video account holders could flag offensive statements, ban individual users from commenting on their videos, and with one click of the button, immediately remove anything - positive, negative or neutral - that anyone left on their channel. Alas, the suits that are at YouTube - a subsidiary of the Googol-pus that is Google - decided recently that, by golly, that just wasn't enough to keep hurtful, hateful and "harmful" comments of videos. Their solution? A new program called "YouTube Heroes," which effectively allows "approved" users to become the Internet equivalent of hall monitors, with the ability to add their own captions to other users' videos (uh-oh), "report inappropriate videos accurately" (double uh-oh) and ... gulp ... mass flag videos for T.O.S. violations. Of course, the almighty Goog has said nothing of how this crowd-sourced content monitoring program will be structured so as to prevent idealistic "Heroes" from simply eliminating all of the videos/users whose ideals don't gel with their own, nor the basic requirements for who can be a "Hero," what the scope of their power is and - the big one, naturally - who and what gets to decide what's "unworthy" of public dissemination? 

To give you a good idea just how well-received the new program is by the YouTube masses, the "Getting Started with YouTube Heroes" trailer currently has only 42 times more thumbs down ratings than thumbs ups. And, considering the whole "YouTube Heroes" program is anchored around curtailing "inappropriate speech," of course YouTube itself had to close down the comments section on its own fucking video, totally not at all foreshadowing some truly ominous shit on the horizon.

It's finally happened: math has formally been declared "racist"

Well, you knew it was bound to happen sooner or later. With feminists already declaring the Scientific Method and the idea of "objective truth"to be inherently misogynistic, Cathy O'Neil, Harvard professor and founder of the incredibly mislabeled "Mathbabe.org, recently released a book stating "weapons of math destruction" are being used to deny minorities life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, primarily in the form of higher loan rates, "personality tests" on job applications and recidivism models she claims are all the resultant of inherently prejudicial computer algorithms based on that most malodorous of maladies ... numerically verified, longitudinally-proven, indisputable statistical fact. Of course, rather than take one look at the cold, hard numbers on the spreadsheet before her and say "well, that's the broad-based data we've got," O'Neil instead blames the generalized data sets based on mathematically-verified behaviors for causing the mathematically-verified behaviors to begin with ... which, uh, I'm pretty sure is a major, MAJOR logical fallacy. Now, I'm no Harvard mathematician, but I think I can help Mrs. (oh, who am I kidding ... like anybody would willingly marry this) O'Neil with those troublesome digits: 

• Minorities in certain zip codes are bestowed higher loan rates because they either don't have a particularly strong credit rating and handing out large loans to people practically guaranteed to default on them kinda' caused the Great Recession.
• Employers, by and large, rate prospective employees on their education, skills, recommendations, prior jobs and as a tie-breaker, whether or not they've ever committed a violent felony. 
• Recidivism models aren't the reason why minorities are in jail ... it's because, for reasons that mayhap forever linger in the domain of conjecture, minorities tend to commit crimes at disproportionately high rates. 

So, in other words? The math is nothing more than rock-solid confirmation of the behavioral roots of the "wealth inequality" problem you hear Ivy League elitists alike O'Neill droning on and on about like manic street preachers. And if there was ever a crucial warning that mainstream U.S. culture needs to start recognizing the importance of "self-responsibility" and "self-determination" in individual economic outcomes, I'm pretty sure the moment you literally declare "math is racist" to be the point of no freakin' return.

...and a few headlines that speak for themselves...

Don King accidentally says the word "nigger" during stump speech for Donald Trump

Hillary Clinton's tech guy apparently went on Reddit and asked for tips on deleting emails

The Supreme Court of Massachusetts rules black people can run away from police if they want to

Volunteer firefighter wrestles would-be elementary school shooter to the ground, saves untold lives in South Carolina

Norfolk rapist convicted of trying to poke victim's eyeballs out with scissors

Detroit man arrested for murdering four step-children in front of estranged wife ... after being freed from prison for killing a pregnant woman in 1991

Afters years of complaints about their films not being culturally diverse enough, Disney forced to yank Moana merchandise from shelves because people think it's racist

Grey's Anatomy star demands black people protest police shootings by refusing to go to work or school...

...while an immensely successful real-life black doctor is mercilessly ravaged by Twitter users for "selling out."

Although black NFL stars are allowed to post images of white cops having their throats slit open on social media, white MLB players are VERBOTEN from criticizing the #BlackLivesMatter movement, because equality

Florida man arrested for throwing four-year-old infant over fence

F.B.I. reports U.S. homicides increased 10.8 percent from 2014 to 2015

Houston mass shooter wears Nazi paraphernalia, nobody brings up the fact he's Hindu

Turkish man kills five people at Washington mall, media reminds us to not "jump to any conclusions"

The New York Times says affirmative action is bullshit ...  but only when it negatively impacts "overperforming" women in China

Christian rapper convicted of murdering music producer with his car

Amusement park closes attraction because activists says it demeans the mentally insane

Power Rangers tweet criticized for obliquely referencing the automobile accident death of the first Yellow Ranger

18-year-old just released from judge-ordered boot camp shoots and kills party-goer over spilled drink

East Tennessee State University student arrested after showing up at #BlackLivesMatter protest wearing gorilla mask, handing out bananas

11-year-old British child nearly blinded by juvenile bleach attack

Indian man tries to strangle mother to death on camera while wife cheers him on

34-year-old teacher gets 14 years for raping 13-year-old student

DePaul University is now making student groups pay a "free speech" tax

Read More