Skip to main content

All Purpose Flour, with a Touch of Vanilla, as a Path to Citizenship

Rep. Steven King from Iowa

“If you go down the road a few generations or maybe centuries with the intermarriage, I’d like to see an America that (is) so homogenous that we look a lot the same from that perspective. I think there’s far too much focus on race, especially in the last eight years. I want to see that put behind us,” King said.

That is from the Washington Post, reported in Google news.

(I am sorry about the syntax of that quote, but Steven King said it.)

Steven King is a Representative to Congress from Iowa.  He wants to put racism behind him by breeding a white-skinned America.  The way he says that is to say that caucasians have to breed faster:   America can’t restore “our civilization with somebody else’s babies".  

Steven King thinks that the color of his skin is what makes America great.  That is racism:  purely, damnably, and stupidly.     

I am tempted to say that it embarrasses me to say that I spent years and years of my life in Iowa, because it does, but Iowa has very little to do with it, except that Steven King was elected by some of the citizens of Iowa.   Steven King embarrasses me.  The people who elected him embarrass me. Iowa, itself, is pretty green.  People like Steven King are everywhere.  Part of what makes Steven King what he is, is in a lot of us.  

It is beyond stupid to think that skin color has to do with anything except skin color.  To believe that skin color is how we should sort ourselves out is like believing that bald people should not be allowed to hold public office, or that tall people should be deported to North Dakota and fenced off with a big, beautiful wall from those of us who cannot dunk a basketball.  Should red haired people be allowed to vote?  Are brown eyes a sign of exceeding intelligence?  Do you want your daughter to marry someone with lots of body hair?  Should body hair determine which bathroom you use?  Do blue eyes make one a good singer?

What is skin color an indication of?  Bigotry?  Steven King is a bigot and his skin color, while not exactly white, is pretty much the color of all purpose flour, with a touch of vanilla.  Like mine.  Maybe Steven King is not a racist, but what he says sounds just like ignorant, damnable racism.  

It is ignorant, damnable racism.  In Iowa, and everywhere. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...