Bigot on Motorcycle in Florida

This picture was forwarded to plezWorld on Wednesday evening by the brother of the woman who took this pic on her camera phone this past weekend. You read the caption correctly, it reads "Nigger Please! It's a White House".

If you look alittle closer at the fender, he's a McCain/Palin supporter! The McCain campaign has made racism and racist comments toward Obama by his supporters acceptable... read this and this and this.

Nothing would please plezWorld more than to have this dude (and thousands like him) wake up on November 5th with Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.

After the second debate in Nashville, McCain took his road show to visit the good people of Strongsville, Ohio. read more...

Who Are You Calling "Boy"?!?

"I'm going to tell you something: That boy's finger does not need to be on the button. He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country."
- Congressman Geoff Davis (R-KY) recounting an alleged interaction with Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) at the Northern Kentucky's 4th Congressional District Lincoln Day Dinner on Saturday night, April 12, 2008!



The Republican Congressman from Kentucky does not dispute the accuracy of the quote. Rep. Davis hand-delivered a written apology to Obama's office when he returned to Washington, DC today.

Read the entire ABC News article here.


plez sez: wait a goddamn minute... who the heck is he calling boy?!? this *ish* is getting out of hand! first that uppity Negro stuff from billary and now this f*ckin' yahoo from kentucky is calling Barack Obama - a United States Senator and quite possibly the next President of the United States - a boy!!!

i'm about to lose my freakin' mind in here.

calling a Black man boy has long been the racist's way of treating Black men like children in the most demeaning way... it is vulgar, it is condescending, it is unbecoming, it is racist, and its only usage is to minimize and denigrate the standing of the Black man. my father grew up in North Carolina in the 30's and 40's... back then, white people would use the term "boy" and "nigger" interchangeably when referring to Black men. calling a Black man a "boy" is WORSE (and i mean it... it is WORSE) than calling him a nigger! how dare you just up and call a grown ass man a boy? i am seeing RED!!!

apology my eye! i don't want to hear an apology from congressman jeff davis... i don't wanna hear *ish* from congressman jeff davis... congress should be moving to censor him.

congressman jeff davis needs to apologize to every Black man who he has ever referred to as "boy"... and i KNOW that Barack Obama wasn't the first!

breath, plezWorld, breath... nice slow, deep breaths...

Clarence Thomas - The Bitter Justice

Clarence Thomas is back in the news. Not only has the Supreme Court begun the fall docket, but he has released a new book, "My Grandfather's Son," for sale. Justice Thomas is doing the obligatory book tour to tout the book in hopes that millions of Americans run out to buy it. I haven't read the book, but if his interview on 60 Minutes and other articles on the matter are any indication, this book will be quite a read.

I ran across a very interesting article on Reason Online entitled "Native Son, Why A Black Supreme Court Justice Has No Rights A White Man Need Respect." It was in 1857 during the Dred Scott case when the question was raised as to whether Blacks were or were not property and therefore if they had or had no rights as a human being. Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney is quoted as saying, "A Negro has no rights which a white man need respect." This article (dated February 1992) gives an in depth analysis as to how Clarence Thomas was the victim of a very old idea called racism:

One of the major reasons for the persistent problem is that millions of white adult Americans define "racism" as its most pathological manifestations: wearing white gowns and hoods, burning crosses, tarring and feathering blacks, hunting them down with dogs. Because those same millions of white Americans would not dream of committing such atrocities; because they vote for political representatives who pass civil-rights bills; because they applauded Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall; because they respect the changing nomenclature by which certain blacks wish to be addressed, they imagine themselves to be free of racism.

What they have never learned is that racism is an idea, a very old and intransigent idea. That idea exists on an unbroken continuum -- all the way from a form that is fully conscious to a form that is unconscious. Its manifestations can range from the most grossly offensive and scornful invective to a compulsive noblesse oblige that cannot permit itself to make any criticisms at all. But whatever the degree or kind of racism, it invariably contains a double standard: The racist simply does not treat black individuals the same way he treats whites.

The effect of stereotypes on blacks is a sense of being unseen, as in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The effect on whites is the corollary: They do not perceive blacks as real or make the same fine discriminations among blacks that they habitually make among whites. In the last analysis, they do not perceive black individuals; they perceive black skins. And this remains true at every step of the continuum.

It should not, therefore, come as an insuperable shock that the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court were a racist phenomenon. The "nice" kind; no Simon Legrees or fiery crosses here. But racist nonetheless. Setting aside old segregationist Strom Thurmond, who conscientiously counterfeited a dead man and may, for all I know, actually have been dead, the other senators participated, singly and collectively -- and unwittingly -- in a process that ceaselessly generated negative stereotypes about Thomas.

The author goes on to lay out the racist stereotypes that were applied Thomas from the day he was nominated by President George Bush (the first) until the day he was confirmed by the Senate:

The Nomination President Bush LIED when he told the nation that Clarence Thomas was the "best" candidate and that he was not chosen because he was Black. Everyone knew that there were other candidates as qualified as (or more qualified than) Clarence Thomas and he was only nominated because he was Black. The nomination was an affirmative action move to maintain a Black seat on the Supreme Court by a party who was against affirmative action.

The Art of Evasion Supreme Court nominees normally do not answer questions about how they will rule on specific situations that may come before them on the bench (i.e. abortion, affirmative action, death penalty, etc.). This works well for white candidates, but when a Black man is evasive, he comes off as being dumb! This label of being not as well-versed on the issues has dogged Justice Thomas since he took his seat on the bench. To this day, it has been implied (and explicitly expressed) that Thomas is a dim-witted right-wing puppet with no original ideas.

The Character Issue Thomas was held up as a clean, obedient, yes-man for the Republican party, he had a "mentor" in Senator John Danforth who had to vouch for Thomas's impeccable credentials as a lawyer and judge. Although, Thomas had a career outside his short time clerking for Danforth, it was essential that he had a white man who could stand for him and "assure" the Senate Committee that this was "a good one"!

The Abortion Issue Thomas was asked almost 100 times to explain what his legal and political opinions would be on any upcoming abortion case. Since no Supreme Court nominee would touch that question with a ten foot pole, Thomas ended up taking the Fifth over 100 times... see the Art of Evasion above!

Anita Hill The article states that Thomas's favorite book is Richard Wright's Native Son, the story of Bigger Thomas, a young Black man who is wrongly accused of the rape and murder of a white woman in the South in the 1940's. The biggest fear of any Black man during that time was to be accused of even looking a white person in the eye, much less, being accused of a sex crime and murder against a white woman! Any Black man was a dead man. Fast forward to 1991 and imagine the horror (and irony) of Clarence Thomas being accused of a sex crime (harassment), a "he said-she said" crime where he could never ever prove his innocence. As with Bigger Thomas, Clarence Thomas was subjected to a "high tech lynching."

Black-on-Black Blacks were turned against Clarence Thomas on Day One and he was NEVER given the opportunity of redemption. He was introduced as a conservative, Black Republican, a devotee of Ronald Reagan and everything liberal, Black Democrats were against... so he has carried that House Nigger title without ever being given the benefit of the doubt. To my way of thinking, this is probably the most damning and most egregious form of racism... turning one Black man against another because of politics. This has divided us and conquered us at every turn since our shackled ancestors walked off that very first slave ship.

Another article of note is from the Washington Post. As a result of a hard life, Justice Thomas lashes out at just about everyone in his new book. The article states that "Justice Clarence Thomas settles scores in an angry and vivid forthcoming memoir, scathingly condemning the media, the Democratic senators who opposed his nomination to the Supreme Court, and the "mob" of liberal elites and activist groups that he says desecrated his life." The article (and 60 Minutes interview) shed some light on why he is so bitter:

Family Life Abandoned by his parents and raised by a stern and authoritarian grandfather, it appears that Thomas never felt loved or wanted by anyone. When he dropped out of seminary school, his grandfather kicked him out.

The Segregated South The blatant racism with which he was raised always looms over his relationships with Blacks and whites.

Religion Thomas had plans on becoming a priest, but disparaging remarks by priests concerning the MLK assassination made him question his religion and was the impetus of him dropping out of the seminary.

Law Degree Although, he received a law degree from Yale, he credits affirmative action for diminishing the value of the degree thus making it difficult for him to find a job after graduation, more than anything, this appears to be the reason why he is against affirmative action and quotas. To this day, people talk about how he was the benefactor of affirmative action, but his counter is the double edged sword that casts doubts on the value or worth of those who benefit from it.

Senate Confirmation Hearings Everyone is familiar with him lashing out at the Senators with his "high tech lynching" comment. The process left such a bad taste in his mouth that he credits that process with ruining his life and he frankly hoped that he did not get confirmed.

Self Hate It appears that he doesn't understand why every Black person does not get up and work like HELL to uplift the race like the grandfather who raised him. I think he looks out at Black America and sees (by and large) a group of lazy and shiftless niggers! It seems to me that he is ashamed to be a member of this race.

View and read the transcript of the 60 Minutes interview here.

plez sez:I watched 60 Minutes on Sunday evening and discussed the Clarence Thomas interview with my wife. We both agreed that he has to be the most bitter man alive. He is so filled with disgust about his life and how that shred of a life that he had was utterly destroyed during his Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings.

As a moderate, plezWorld has taken a vastly different approach to Clarence Thomas as evidenced in my Clarence Thomas: American Hero post. For some reason, I've been able to muster up some empathy for the misunderstood and sad man who is Clarence Thomas, only the second Black Supreme Court Justice.

In his book, Thomas writes of his Senate Confirmation Hearings, "The mob I now faced carried no ropes or guns. Its weapons were smooth-tongued lies spoken into microphones and printed on the front pages of America's newspapers. But it was a mob all the same, and its purpose -- to keep the black man in his place -- was unchanged." It is obvious that he understands that he was a victim of racism, I don't think he understands that the Republicans who propped him up where as racist as the Democrats who attacked him.

Clarence Thomas is a sad and bitter man who appears to find no joy in being a member of the highest court in the land. In the television interview, he had a difficult time even referring to himself as a Black man. To me that was the saddest revelation of all: he hates life, he hates what life has done to him, and above all, he hates himself. That is sad...

Black Bloggers Fuel Jena 6 Protest

It is rare that I turn plezWorld over to an entire news article, but this one is so important, its presence cannot be denied. Two days ago, a story ran in the Chicago Tribune that correctly identified a cosmic shift in direction for the slowing Civil Rights Movement. As evidenced by the Shaquanda Cotton incident in Texas, the Genarlow Wilson sentence in Georgia, and now the Jena 6 Ordeal in Louisiana, the Blackosphere (Black Bloggers) have taken a leadership position normally reserved for "race baiting" reverends to enlighten the country about wrongs being perpetrated against Black people. Black Bloggers such as plezWorld, others associated with the AfroSphere, and hundreds of others, established a clarion call to the world to shine a light on the dark and miserable existence that is Jena, Louisiana... and its cold and racist underbelly.

I am privileged to have been a part of what the article calls the "viral civil rights movement." But moreso, I take solice in the fact that the AfroSphere, after only a year or so of existence, can take the credit for being a catalyst for change in this country: read the article about today's March on Jena.

The Chicago Tribune article follows (in its entirety):

Blogs help drive Jena protest
By Howard Witt Tribune senior correspondent
5:14 PM CDT, September 18, 2007

JENA, La. - There is no single leader. There is no agreed schedule. Organizers aren't even certain where everyone is supposed to gather, let alone use the restroom. The only thing that is known for sure is that thousands of protesters are boarding buses at churches, colleges and community centers across the country this week, headed for this tiny dot on the map of central Louisiana.

What could turn out to be one of the largest civil rights demonstrations in years is set to take place here Thursday, when Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III, popular black radio talk show hosts and other celebrities converge in Jena to protest what they regard as unequal treatment of African-Americans in this racially fractured Deep South town.

Yet this will be a civil rights protest literally conjured out of the ether of cyberspace, of a type that has never happened before in America—a collective national mass action grown from a grassroots word-of-mouth movement spread via Internet blogs, e-mails, message boards and talk radio.

Jackson, Sharpton and other big-name civil rights figures, far from leading this movement, have had to scramble to catch up. So, too, has the national media, which has only recently noticed a story that has been agitating many black Americans for months.

As formidable as it is amorphous, this new African-American blogosphere, which scarcely even existed a year ago, now comprises hundreds of interlinked blogs and tens of the thousands of followers who within a matter of a few weeks collected 220,000 petition signatures—and more than $130,000 in donations for legal fees—in support of six black Jena teenagers who are being prosecuted on felony battery charges for beating a white student.

"Ten years ago this couldn't have happened," said Sharpton, who said he first heard about the Jena case on the Internet. "You didn't have the Internet and you didn't have black blogs and you didn't have national radio shows. Now we can talk to all of black America every day. We've been able to form our own underground railroad of information, and when everybody else looks up, it's already done."

Hotels are booked up for miles around Jena, the Louisiana State Police are drawing officers from across the state to help control the crowds and schools and many businesses in the town of 3,000 will close Thursday in anticipation of 10,000 or more demonstrators who are expected, organizers predicted.

The momentum for the protest did not slow even when the original reason for the event—the scheduled sentencing of Mychal Bell, 17, the first of the "Jena 6" defendants to be tried and convicted of aggravated second-degree battery—evaporated.

Last week, a state appellate court abruptly vacated Bell's June 28 conviction, ruling that he had been improperly tried as an adult rather than a juvenile. The local district attorney, Reed Walters, has vowed to challenge that decision, and Bell remains jailed in lieu of $90,000 bond.

What's animating the protesters is not merely Bell's legal predicament but the larger perception that blacks in Jena, who make up 12 percent of the population, are still subjected to the kind of persistent racial inequality that once predominated across the Old South.

In a town where whites voted overwhelmingly for former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke when he ran for Louisiana governor in 1991, one local barber shop still refuses to cut black men's hair.

And the trouble in Jena (pronounced Jee-na) started a year ago with a resonant symbol from the Jim Crow past: After black students asked administrators at the local high school for permission to sit beneath a shade tree traditionally used only by whites, white students hung three nooses from the tree. The incident outraged black students and their parents, but was dismissed by the school superintendent as a youthful prank; he punished the white students with three-day suspensions.

A series of fights between whites and blacks ensued, both on and off the campus. Whites implicated in the fights were charged with misdemeanors or not at all, while the blacks were charged with felonies.

In November, someone burned down the central wing of the high school—an arson for which no one has been arrested.

And then in early December, Bell and five other black students at the high school were charged after a white student was jumped and beaten while he lay unconscious.

Although the white student was treated and released at a local hospital, Walters initially charged the six black youths with attempted murder—charges that he later reduced to aggravated second-degree battery after black bloggers and civil rights leaders from across the country raised complaints that the charges were excessive.

Besides Sharpton, King and Jackson, the NAACP and the ACLU will have contingents here Thursday, as will the Millions More Movement led by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

But many black bloggers say the Jena demonstration is really more about a new generation of civil rights activists who learned about the Jena case not from Operation Push but from hip-hop music blogs that featured the story or popular black entertainers such as Mos Def who have turned it into a crusade.

"In traditional civil rights groups, there's a pattern—you call a meeting, you see when everybody can get together, you have to decide where to meet," said Shawn Williams, 33, a pharmaceutical salesman and former college NAACP leader who runs the popular Dallas South Blog.

"All that takes time," Williams added. "When you look at how this civil rights movement is working, once something gets out there, the action is immediate—here's what we're going to write about, here's the petition, here's the protest. It takes place within minutes, hours and days, not weeks or months."

This new, "viral" civil rights movement now taking shape still benefits from the participation of well-known leaders like Jackson or Sharpton—it just doesn't depend on them, bloggers say.

It was black bloggers, for example, who first picked up the story of Shaquanda Cotton, a 14-year-old black girl from the east Texas town of Paris who was sentenced to up to 7 years in youth prison for shoving a hall monitor at her high school. The judge who heard her case had given probation to a 14-year-old white girl charged with the more serious crime of arson.

After the bloggers and their readers bombarded the Texas governor with protest letters and petitions, Texas authorities freed Cotton—days before Sharpton had scheduled a rally on her behalf.

"When Rev. Jackson or Rev. Sharpton or other recognized leaders get involved, that's helpful, and it helps them—they can see where momentum is building around an issue," said James Rucker, the 38-year-old founder of Color of Change, an Internet-based civil rights group that has more than 280,000 subscribers. "You can argue they came late to Jena, but they are here now, which is good."

The blogs also serve as watchdogs over more traditional civil rights groups. When the NAACP first began featuring the Jena case on its Web site and claimed to be soliciting contributions for the teens' legal defense, it was a black blogger who quickly pointed out that the donation link directed visitors to the generic NAACP fundraising page, with no way for donors to direct their funds to the Jena defendants.

Within days, the link was redirected to a bona fide Jena 6 fundraising site.

I'm not physically in Jena, Louisiana today, but I'm there in spirit!

Blogging for Justice - The Jena 6

Bill Quigley wrote the following in his blog entry:

All White Jury sitting before White Judge agrees with White Prosecutor and All White Witnesses and Convicts Black Youth in Racially Charged High School Criminal Case

Catch up with me on this story:

A Black student asks for and is granted permission by school authorities to sit with white students under the "white tree" where a majority of the 80% white student body sits during lunch.

The next day, three nooses were hanging from the "white tree"... the message was pretty clear.

The principal found the 3 white students who were responsible for the nooses and had them expelled.

The white superintendent overruled the principal and gave the students a 3 day suspension, saying that the nooses were a "youthful stunt."

Black students organized a sit-in under the "white tree" to protest the light suspensions given to the noose-hanging students

The white DA threatens the Black students by saying "I can take away your lives with a stroke of my pen."

Later that fall, a fire burned down the main academic building of Jena High School.

A few days later, a black student who showed up at a white student's party is beaten by whites.

The next day, a young white man pulled out a shotgun and threatened a group of Blacks at a local convenience store... they succeed in wrestling the gun from him. The Black men who took the shotgun away were arrested and no charges were filed against the white man.

A few days later at the high school, a white student - who had been making racial taunts (including the n-word) while supporting the students who hung the nooses and who beat up the Black student at the off-campus party - got the dogshit kicked out of him by Black students... he was taken to the hospital where he was treated and released.

Six Black Jena High School students were arrested and charged with attempted second degree murder!

All six students were expelled from Jena High School.

All six students remain in jail unable to raise the $90,000 bond money.

Please read Injustice in Jena as Nooses Hang from the "White Tree" by Bill Quigley on The Smirking Chimp for all of the details of the case.

plez sez: i tried my best to resist the urge to write a post about the injustice that occurs to this day in Jena, Louisiana: everything had already been written, i didn't know all of the facts, or this was just the "flavor of the month" in the victimology department. after being spurred on by August 30th being "Day of Blogging for Justice," i decided to do some reading and if need be, write my thoughts on this volatile situation.

as Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

i cannot see or fathom why this case hasn't garnered more national ink or press. where are the reverends (al and jesse)? i would expect them to be camped out on the Jena Courthouse steps! instead of lending token support to michael vick, where is the NAACP? shouldn't they be down there with their lawyers getting these boys out of jail and getting those bogus charges dropped? i know alberto gonzalez has other things on his mind, but since this looks like a hate crime being perpetrated by the authorities in Jena, shouldn't the justice department be all over this? are our Black lives worth less than that of some stinking pit bulls? if not, why have i seen PETA protests for the past 3 weeks, but not a DAMN thing about this injustice?

oh ok... i get it... even if you reduce yourself to a shucking and jiving, skinnin' and grinnin', yes massa, coonin' Black man, your life still ain't worth ___ YOUR FAVORITE EXPLETIVE HERE ___!

use this MEDIA LINK to talk back to the media
read the JENA 6 PRESS RELEASE

"Read A Book" - The Rap Video

I stumbled across the following video on YouTube.com. It is a somewhat entertaining satire on the state of hip hop today. I edited the description of the video:

This was shot on BET Animation [for] "106 & Park". It is a satirical observation on the current ridiculous, offensive, and embarrassing state of the once noble art of hip hop. The rapper who made the song is also satirizing the current popular rap music which is an embarrassment to everything [that] rap was. While making this social satire, he also provides a positive message [mixed with some] social commentary.

WARNING:
Due to excessive cussin' and gratuitous use of the n-word,
this video is NOT suitable for children.

plez sez: i grappled with myself for several days trying to decide whether to post this video on my blog. i don't want anyone to misconstrue this blog as a supporter of this kind of "art."

i tend to agree with the video description that this is a sad commentary on the state of rap (and hip hop). the question we should ask, "what is more important, the message or the messenger?" should we continue to support and make millionaires out of the kind of "artists" who would write, produce, and distribute something that you wouldn't want your young children to listen to?

back in the day, it was understood that Millie Jackson, Redd Foxx, and Richard Pryor were only for adults. but now, "artists" like Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent enjoy mass distribution and airplay of their "art" no matter how crude and vile the content.

i remember when rap music first enjoyed popularity (late 70's and early 80's): there wasn't an emphasis on "keepin' it real"! there was little or no cursing. believe it or not, but the Video Vixen is a relatively new phenomenon. and the n-word didn't enjoy such popularity in our music.

if it weren't so sad, it would be funny.

damn! i long for the days of rap songs like "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five."

Putting the N-word in Perspective

In an undated performance on HBO's Def Poetry, Julian Curry puts the N-word in perspective.

Caution: The N-word is used often... and with emphasis!

plez sez: This is a powerful and in-your-face treatise on why no one should ever use the N-word again.