THE SIGHTLESS BIRD: HONOR AND PREVILEDGE
Cecil Callahan
SENIOR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENTS, PRIVATE EQUITY , ESG, RENEWABLE ENERGY
SIGHTLESS BIRD
THE HONOR OF PRIVILEDGE
As an immigrant, I am received favorably relative to Africans in White(southern) and Arab (north) African Countries. Flores, the son of Hondurans as Colin Kaepernick, the adopted son of Russians have had a path much more different than a Descendants Of American Slaves(DOAS)
As many immigrants or immigrant offspring’s they were award an "Honorary White” status in America and South Africa.
American football has discriminated against DOAS for equal opportunity for decades. This is not a surprise for DOAS. Racism is expected. As a result, we simply make attempts to manage within the system. We often hide the shame of the conditions from DOAS women and children. This part of the psychological violence of racism and it impact on DOAS family relationships. The problem that football has now is DOAS women are talking about the problem and the defense shield of DOAS male Chauvinism as been shattered. No one can iron the bend of a man’s back like the heat of a DOAS woman.
But when you are an Honorary White person, as Kaeperneck, or Flores you do not expect to be exposed to the risk of DOAS. You don’t know the rules or understand the social mores.
Hopefully, you or your parents read the Constitution when immigrating but failed to study and ask why are there the 13th 14thand 15th Amendments in the US Constitution. This should have shed a light useful in the darkness in the melting pot.
Honorary whites is a term that was used by the apartheid regime of South Africa to grant almost all of the rights and privileges of whites to those who would otherwise have been treated as non-whites.[clarification needed] This was made on a case by case basis to select individuals but also to groups of people, mostly people of East and Southeast Asian descent who were ascribed as honorary whites.
Such examples includesome Austronesians, Japanese, Koreans and residents of Taiwan who were granted this "honorary white" status, and later on other Chinese and individually designated figures of various other races were added as well.
Honorary Whites are told that they are different when compared with local and indigenous African. White South Africa and White America portrays the local Africans as inferior and responsible for their own plight. The immigrant, Black, Yellow, Brown or Red is often up lifted and given advances to enforce the psychological violence of America and South Africa Racism. It is the racist escape and denial of blame.
The Historically Advantaged or “White” racist psychosis creates examples of Black success in order to cleanse themselves of the reality of racism.
RACISM AND THE CYCLE OF INHUMMANITY
LIBERIA AND THE PSYCHOSIS OR THE
THE CYCLE OF RACISM OF THE VICTIM
ADOPTING THE OPPRESSORS MODEL OF APARTHIED AND RACISM IN IMMIGRATION.
The local this disadvantaged or African population does not have the resources to mount sophisticated and elaborated violence. This is also found in Liberia a place where members of my family lived serving in the Peace Core.
The first freed American slaves, the American settlers arrived in the region between 1820 and 1843. After the Civil War the population grew with newly liberated (LIBERIA) free blacks were from Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, while smaller numbers came from northern states like New Jersey, New York, Delaware, and Connecticut.
They were called "Americo-Liberian" and "Congo" had distinct definitions in the nineteenth century, they are currently interchangeable and refer to an ethnic group composed of the descendants of the various free and ex-slave African-American
In addition to indigenous Liberian chiefs and royal families, upper-class Americo-Liberians and their descendants led the political, social, cultural and economic sectors of the country; alongside indigenous Liberian elites, upper-class Americo-Liberians ruled the new nation from 19th century until 1980 as a small but dominant minority.
From 1878 to 1980, the Republic of Liberia was a de facto one-party state, ruled by elites of both the indigenous and Americo-Liberian-dominated True Whig Party and Masonic Order of Liberia.
These former American Slaves imported the inhumanity of their American Slaves and practice to the colonial settlement of Liberia.
The American immigrant (slaves) and local African Apartheid War began when WP Americo-Liberian president Tolbert sought to introduce some liberal reforms including addressing imbalances between Americo-Liberians and the indigenous peoples by bringing more native figures into the government. However, these reforms proved unpopular among some of the Americo-Liberian population (including members of his cabinet) who felt Tolbert was undermining their position and accused him of "letting the peasants into the kitchen" while native Liberians felt the changes were happening too slowly.
In 1980, native Liberian Samuel Doe led the 1980 Liberian coup d'état in which Tolbert was assassinated and Americo-Liberian political dominance came to an end.
Doe's tenure as leader of Liberia led to a period of civil wars, resulting in destruction of the country's economy. In the early 21st century, Liberia has been reduced to one of the most impoverished nations in the world, in which most of the population lives below the international poverty line.
This is the great rethink on DOAS going back to Africa.
Many of the most successful Black businesspeople in South Africa are immigrants from Zimbabwe, Zambia and other former apartheid states. Based on observations Descendants Of American Slaves operate with better relationships with White South Africans than White Americans. Much of this is due to Honorary White Status and observations of similar challenges of the minority population complexities. We share what many minority groups share in the world. The threat of random majority violence. The two groups meet someone on the arc where the decline in privilege approaches unprivileged .
I recall during the Rivonia trial, which led to the imprisonment of Mandela and Sisulu, the prosecutor stated “if racism in South Africa is bad why are we required to restrict the thousands of Africans begging to immigrate and come in. America’s comforts with racism is supported by people of color immigration.
No one question, if Europeans support human rights why they immigrate to the major centers of human rights violations; America and South Africa. Over 50% of all my neighbors in South Africa are from Europe. About 20% of my neighbors in North Atlanta are immigrants. Georgia has 50 cricket clubs. Examples of Apartheid immigrants to Americans include, a former Coca Cola CEO (Zimbabwe), Ian Musk, and the Dr. Tobin who testified for Minneapolis police in the George Floyd Case.
Martin Tobin, an expert pulmonologist immigrant from Cape Town, testified that "a healthy person subjected to what Mr. Floyd was subjected to would have died." And Dr. Jonathan Rich, a cardiologist and one of the state's final witnesses, testified Monday that while Floyd had high blood pressure, his heart was "exceptionally strong.”
South Africa is the only land that is obviously a destination were an immigrant seeks an association with the African people. For America, typically people immigrant and seek a relationship with the population that control the economy.
Much of the DOAS community colonization of each generation of immigrants is the consequence of immigrants importing or integrating the traditional role of indentured servants and traders for European colonizer. The low income DOAS community is colonized with the sell of low quality goods. Quite similar to East Africa and the Caribbean . The mercantilism is the failure to reinvest in the exploited community. The profits are often found in foreign remittances replacing foreign aid in the New World Economic System. Today remittances far exceed foreign aid.
Racism often follows immigrants into the American melting pot from Latin America, Middle East, Asia and Europe, Africa. Supporting human rights is not a requirement to immigrate to America. Just as angry and bitter Europeans fled to apartheid South Africa after being defeated in Africa’s decolonization wars. Oppressors and human rights violators immigrate to America. For example, White South Africans, advantage ethnic groups in Asia, Africa etc. immigrate to America when challenged on inequality and economic redistribution. The world immigrates to America for the security of social privilege based of skin color, appearance, wealth etc….
To become an Honorary White often releases a energy to prove deserving and the immigrant adopt the repressive practices. For example, a Russian immigrant and child of a Hmong immigrant assisted in the murder of George Floyd. Racism against Africans and Descendants of American Slaves is often the Honorary White initiation.
Immigrants often serve as the first line in DOAS exploitation. They often receive SBA and other government assistance in colonizing low incomeAmerican community.
Flores says he won’t drop lawsuit even if hired as coach
By TERESA M. WALKERyesterday
Brian Flores says his lawsuit against the NFL over alleged racist hiring practices will continue even if he becomes a head coach again this offseason.
Flores has interviewed with the Houston Texans and New Orleans Saints, who have yet to fill their coaching vacancies. If they call, Flores will listen, but he said the suit will go on because the league needs change.
“This is about changing the hiring practices in the National Football League, and that’s what this lawsuit is about,” Flores said Wednesday on CNN. “I want to coach football that’s what I’m called to do.”
Flores said he knows others have similar stories and that it is hard to speak out. He called his potential sacrifice bigger than football or coaching. The NFL is at a fork in the road, he said.
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“We’re going keep it the way it is or go in another direction and make some change where we’re actually changing the hearts and minds of those who make decisions to hire head coaches, executives, et cetera,” Flores said on CBS. “That’s what we’ve got to get to. We’ve got to change hearts and minds.”
Tony Dungy, a Pro Football Hall of Fame coach, wrote an open letter to NFL owners Wednesdayand shared a link on social media.
“One year ago I wrote a letter to NFL owners saying the NFL had a problem only they could solve,” Dungy wrote on Twitter. “Not a lot has changed. Brian Flores’ suit shows the frustration many black coaches have. It could be just the tip of the iceberg. Something has to change!”
Flores’ lawsuit was filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court. It is seeking class-action status and unspecified damages from the league, the Miami Dolphins, the Denver Broncos and the New York Giants, along with unidentified individuals.
The NFL, Dolphins, Broncos and Giants have denied Flores’ accusations. In its statement, the NFL said it will defend “against these claims, which are without merit.”
Rod Graves, executive director of the Fritz Pollard Alliance and a former general manager in the league, noted Flores’ lawsuit is the latest call to action for the NFL and its team owners.
The Alliance, which fights for equity and inclusion in pro football, is named after a Black player and coach in the 1920s who is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
”Men and women of color in the NFL community have long known that the odds of advancing in the coaching ranks and in the front office are stacked against them,” Graves said in a statement. “The Fritz Pollard Alliance supports coach Flores and others in their effort to level the playing field for men and women of color.”
Flores, 40, was fired last month by Miami after leading the Dolphins to a 24-25 record over three years. They went 9-8 in their second straight winning season, but failed to make the playoffs during his tenure.
According to the lawsuit, Dolphins owner Stephen Ross told Flores he would pay him $100,000 for every loss during the coach’s first season because he wanted the club to “tank” so it could get the draft’s top pick.
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The lawsuit alleged that Ross then pressured Flores to recruit a prominent quarterback in violation of the league’s tampering rules. When Flores refused, he was cast as the “angry Black man” who is difficult to work with and was derided until he was fired, the suit said.
Flores said he had conversations with general manager Chris Grier that Ross was upset that Miami was compromising its draft position by winning too many games. Flores said he also talked repeatedly with Ross, who said the team didn’t need to win right then and the coach was under contract.
“That’s not something you make up,” Flores said of those conversations.
The Cleveland Browns refuted suggestions by former coach Hue Jackson and an associate that he was paid by the team to lose games, calling the claims “completely fabricated.” Jackson, now coaching at Grambling, made several posts on Twitter inferring he received bonus payments from owner Jimmy Haslam while coaching Cleveland.
What drove Flores to file the lawsuit was a string of text messages with Patriots coach Bill Belichick three days before his scheduled Giants interview, leading Flores to believe Brian Daboll already had been chosen as the new coach.
“It was humiliating to be quite honest,” Flores said. “There was disbelief, there was anger, there was a wave of emotion for a lot of reasons.”
Anthony Lynn, a former Chargers head coach fired earlier this month as Lions offensive coordinator, said Wednesday he definitely understood Flores’ feelings.
“He should not have been let go,” Lynn said.
Since the NFL implemented the Rooney Rule in 2003 to boost hiring of minority coaches, 27 of 127 head coaching jobs have gone to minorities. This year, white men have filled the first four of nine head coaching jobs.
The rule requires teams to interview at least two external minority candidates for general manager/executive of football operations positions, head coach and all coordinator roles. At least one of those interviews must be held in-person for any head coach or general manager opening.
Dungy told The Associated Press last month Rooney’s goal was to slow the hiring process down and investigate different candidates, creating a search process rather than an interview quota.
“My hope would be for owners to spell out very specifically what they’re looking for and then have them really research a variety of people before making a decision,” Dungy told the AP.
Teryl Austin, a senior assistant defensive coach with Pittsburgh with the NFL’s lone Black head coach in Mike Tomlin, has been interviewed for 11 head coaching jobs without being hired. He talked to the AP in October about the NFL’s hiring pipeline and said the interviews are “invaluable experiences” and that the rule gets Black candidates in front of owners.
Flores’ lawsuit mentions Austin as someone who was “Never Given a Chance” among the coaches who have interviewed for head coaching jobs unsuccessfully.
Yes, Austin could tell when an interview was real or merely scratching the Rooney Rule box.
“I could tell when I was really in it,” Austin said. “And so to me, that’s kind of worth it.”
Flores said he understands this lawsuit may keep him from ever coaching again. He’s being called the NFL’s Rosa Parks in taking on the league’s hiring practices, and Flores called that a humbling comparison.
“That gives me more confidence that we made the right decision here and that we need to continue to fight for that change,” Flores said.
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Clemente, the Double Outsider
June 19, 2015
Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates during spring training in 1956, before his second season.Mark Kauffman/Sports Illustrated, via Getty Images
Today there is an abundance of Latinos in Major League Baseball, but not when Roberto Clemente took right field for the Pittsburgh Pirates 60 years ago this spring.
Clemente’s ordeal as a Puerto Rican breaking into what was then a very white preserve — and the aplomb with which he transcended his difficulties — reminds us of how far Latinos have come in American life.
Had he lived, Clemente, at the age of 81 this August, would have witnessed the formidable surge of Latinos into the national pastime — a phenomenon he had helped launch.
Born to what he called “the most wonderful mother and father who ever lived” (the latter a foreman in the sugar cane fields), the proud, intense, sometimes melancholy Clemente was discovered at age 18 by the Brooklyn Dodgers scout Al Campanis, who later called him “the best free-agent athlete I’ve ever seen.” After signing with the Dodger organization, he was drafted at 20 by the Pirates.
As Rob Ruck wrote in “Raceball” (2011), every player with Latino heritage who was in the majors before Jackie Robinson broke the color bar in 1947 “was either Caucasian or able to pass as such.” (An example of the latter was Ted Williams, who diverted public attention from the fact that his mother was born to Mexican parents.)
Like the Cuban-born Minnie Minoso, who started playing with the Cleveland Indians in 1949, Clemente was not only Latino but also black. Encountering mainland American culture after what he considered to be the more racially harmonious Puerto Rico, he later said he felt like a double outsider. Hank Aaron observed (as quoted by David C. Ogden in the 2008 book “Reconstructing Fame”) that early in Clemente’s career, when he had to improve his English and adjust to American society, “it was probably harder on him than it was on me.”
During one spring training in Florida, when Clemente had to stay on the bus while teammates dined in segregated restaurants, he warned the Pirates general manager Joe L. Brown that he and black teammates (who were also barred from residing in the team’s hotel) would refuse to take the bus “if we can’t eat where the white players eat.” (Brown tried to defuse the problem by finding his black players a station wagon.)
Nor did he feel very welcome in working-class Pittsburgh, where there were few Latinos, and white and black citizens lived largely apart. Unschooled in speaking for a public audience and with English as his second language, he accidentally offended some African-Americans by telling a reporter that after his upbringing in Puerto Rico, he had not been prepared to endure discrimination “like a Negro,” then later defended himself, explaining, “Look at my skin — I am not of the white people.”
After a stellar performance when the Pirates defeated the Yankees in the 1960 World Series, Clemente smoldered when he was denied the award for Series most valuable player. (The winner, Bobby Richardson, remains the only player to receive the award despite being on the losing team.)
After a 1961 interview with Clemente, Howard Cohn wrote in Sport Magazine that Clemente believed that black Latinos “are treated today much like all Negroes were treated in baseball” during the early years after 1947 and that they “bear the brunt of the sport’s remaining racial prejudices.”
In 1964, San Francisco Giants Manager Alvin Dark barred his Latino players from speaking Spanish in their clubhouse, insisting that it would damage team cohesion. This was also the era of the stereotyped Hispanic character Jose Jimenez (played by the comedian Bill Dana, until he finally dropped it, in 1970, after pressure from American Latinos).
From the start, some sportswriters tried to portray Clemente as a similarly ludicrous Mr. Malaprop, speaking “Spanglish.” Les Biederman of The Pittsburgh Press, for example, rendered young Clemente as confiding: “Me like hot weather, veree hot. I no run fast cold weather.” Others had him saying, “Me no married yet.”
Incensed, Clemente complained, “I never in my life start a sentence with ‘me.’ ” As noted in David Maraniss’s 2006 Clemente biography, the Pirates’ Don Leppert was concerned that Roberto was being cast as a “buffoon”; Leppert challenged Biederman, “Why the hell don’t you ask him questions in Spanish?” Ignoring Clemente’s requests to use his actual first name, some reporters Anglicized it throughout his career as “Bob” or “Bobby.”
Clemente was cast as a “chronic complainer” for his occasional tendency to overshare information about his physical maladies (he indeed had spinal problems, the lingering result of a car crash, as well as malaria and other ailments). Myron Cope, writing for Sports Illustrated, was not alone when he said in 1966 that Clemente was “baseball’s champion hypochondriac.”
“Hypochondriacs cannot produce,” Clemente privately responded in fury. “I produce!”
Clemente’s monumental self-possession was sometimes mistaken for conceit. In support of the narrative of Clemente as hot dog, some reporters cited the fact that he had once declared (perhaps trying to convey the depth of his professional commitment), “For me, I am the best ballplayer in the world.”
Stung by such treatment, Clemente generally kept his distance from the press but once bluntly insisted to a reporter that the reason he was treated with such disrespect was “because I’m black and Puerto Rican.” He once told Phil Musick of The Pittsburgh Press, “You don’t know a damn thing about me.”
Thus Clemente immersed himself in a personal world revolving around his extended family, his assiduous work on the baseball diamond — he was a four-time National League batting champion — and the people of Puerto Rico, who exalted him as a hero. He made sure that all three sons born to him and his wife, Vera, were born on the island, where he kept a farm, and was deeply involved in Puerto Rican charities relating to young people and sports.
After Pittsburgh defeated the Orioles in the 1971 World Series, Clemente, who had batted .414, was this time indeed named most valuable player.Speaking in Spanish, he started a live postgame television interview with the Pirates’ announcer, Bob Prince (who referred to him as “Bobby”), by asking for the “blessing” of his parents on his home island, and thanking all Puerto Ricans on “the proudest moment of my life.”
The sportswriter Ira Berkow rightly complained at the time that “out of ignorance or confusion,” Prince “did not ask Clemente to interpret, and the poignant moment was lost in the following button-down clichés from a mayor, a governor, a commissioner, an owner.”
In September 1972, Clemente achieved his 3,000th major league hit in his last time at bat in the regular season.
Three months later, just before Christmas, Clemente, at home in Puerto Rico, was distraught to learn of a disastrous earthquake in Nicaragua, where he coached amateur baseball players. After trying to get help, disgusted by reports that food, medicine and other emergency resources were being mismanaged or stolen, he chartered a DC-7 to fly from San Juan to Managua with relief supplies on New Year’s Eve.
Soon after takeoff, Clemente’s plane disappeared into the Atlantic. His Pirates teammate Manny Sanguillen braved shark-heavy waters to help search for his friend’s remains, which were never found. Clemente had confided to his wife that he always expected to die young.
The following year, the Baseball Hall of Fame suspended its traditional five-year waiting period to admit Clemente; The New York Times pronounced him “the first Latin-American player picked for the museum.”
Musick, the Pittsburgh sportswriter, later said, “When I heard he was dead, I wished that sometime I had told him I thought he was a hell of a guy.”