Tuesday – 04 February 2014

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I was at a bit of a quandary about what to choose for today’s Black History Month entry.

Until yesterday morning.

There are many fine options for choosing an “A” entry for my first post of the month:

  • Abolition
  • Achievements
  • Africa
  • African Americans in the Civil War
  • Art

…to name a few, not to mention the names of the famous and the not-so-famous. But none of those struck the chord in me that today’s topic did. What is it? You already know. Or at least, you know if you were paying attention earlier.

Today’s topic is: America. More specifically, it’s “America. It’s Beautiful,” But, I’ll get back to that in just a moment. First, I’d like you to take a few minutes to enjoy this:

That was the late Ray Charles performing what my brother-in-law, John, has deemed the finest rendition of the song America the Beautiful. I’m inclined to agree with him.

As I said above, my topic for today’s post is “America. It’s Beautiful.” And it is, in many ways – ways that I think that this attempted to demonstrate:

The Coca-Cola Corporation attempted to show that America is more than just a world superpower, it’s a country that is made up of a diverse collection of people. In a sixty-second spot, they showed people living out their lives and dreams. (Many of the images featured a Coca-Cola product or logo in them, but it’s a commercial, after all.)

America is full of many great things. It has been called “The Land of Opportunity” for hundreds of years. One of the first sights that greeted immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries was the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island in the New York Harbor. In the statue’s base is a plate inscribed with the poem The New Colossus, which includes the following lines:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

What better way to welcome people to their new home?

So why is it that nearly 150 years after those words were written, it seems that we are no longer a country that welcomes those yearning for something more or tolerant of those who are different? There was a great uproar on the Internet (I know, I know…) over Coke’s interpretation of America The Beautiful, mostly because it dared to present the song in languages other than English. If you’re curious as to some of the things said, please take a look at Speak English!: Racist Revolt As Coca-Cola Airs Multilingual ‘America the Beautiful’ Super Bowl Ad. There, you can see a handful of examples of the dark undercurrent of what America has to offer.

I asked a few people what their thoughts on the commercial were1.
(NOTE – Some comments include language that some may find offensive)

  • My brother, Adam (African-Amercian male, married to a white woman, with two biracial children), had this to say:

    Oh sweet fucking mercy. Xenophobic cock monkeys who are so insulated in their own little world of white picket fences and car pooling need to get a life. America is – and always will be – a land of many colors and creeds. Lest we forget: the Pilgrims and every other blonde-haired blue-eyed [person] was an illegal alien at one time, just ask the Native Americans they disenfranchised.

    I wear a uniform of a country that practices stop-and-frisk in its major cities and wear it with other men and women that John Q. Sixpack would call a “terrorist,” because they pray to a different God. Don’t be shined when people say we need to return to old-fashioned values, what they mean by that is when whites had their own schools and people of color were subjugated and lived in slums at the expense of the white elite.

    I can’t walk down the street holding my wife’s hand in Fort Collins, CO without some white women grabbing her purse. Women, please, do you know how much I make?! But if she saw me in my flight suit, she would shower me with thanks and praise. Sometimes, I just want to smack people for being so repulsive. What… you can’t be a Jew, Muslim, or any other religion and love this country?

    I hope that answers your question.

  • My brother-in-law, John (Greek-American, married to my sister, with three biracial children) offered up this about the Coke commercial, as well as the Cheerios commercial that preceded it:

    My first thought on the Cheerios commercial was “kid was cute. Commercial was boring.”

    My first thought on the Coke commercial was, no joke: “OK, how many nanoseconds is it going to take for the morons on the Twittersphere to lose their minds with collective grammatically incorrect diarrhea?”

    I liked the commercial. I thought it was sweet, well done, benign, and forgettable. But sadly I knew there would be the usual willfully ignorant vocal minority who use the ‘net as a megaphone for their stupidity.

    So here’s the deal — I’m not sure why folks choose to focus on a friggin’ commercial for bubbly sugar water (or before that, a cereal that nobody eats after the age of 9) as a vehicle for their imagined grievances.

    I like to think the younger generation is more tolerant — or at least, don’t see any of this as more than the side show it is. This thought is probably true…but again, the internet is a grand megaphone for the stupid.

    Ironically, nobody seemed to notice the Coke ad also had a gay couple in it. They were too busy bitching about ‘Murca and how it apparently is going down the tubes because someone had the nerve to sing in another language

    Overall — much ado about nothing. It’s what we do best as a country. But for the record, oh ye willfully ignorant — and yes, I’ll continue to refer to them as willfully ignorant, because that’s exactly what they are — not stupid, not ignorant, but proudly and willfully ignorant — America the Beautiful is NOT our #$(&ing national anthem. Our national anthem is the one about bombs and war. So there’s that.

    And one last thought — you remember the old Chris Rock routine about blacks vs. n****s?He goes off on an epic rant about how n****s love to NOT know. How do you think these same ignorant idiots would react if black folk went off on these similar rants? Pretty sure we’d hear the word “thug” and some blather about race cards, some epithets, etc. Because…well…BLACK people. YOU know.

  • My friend, Chris (White male, married to a Brazilian woman, with one biracial child) had this to say:

    Seriously, I liked it. I like that song more than most of the blind patriotism songs, and I thought it was well done, but not surprising for a professionally made commercial. But didn’t think it was all that memorable. And now I really think the screaming was the point, to MAKE it memorable.

    I saw something today on a friend’s FB feed, that the song was originally called, O Mother dear, Jerusalem, and the songwriter was a lesbian. So the “tradition” card is trumped, right at the start.

    I think that it demonstrates very well just how much racism is still around, and how comfortable the racists are about being very vocal about it. No shame at all.

    It seems to have really overshadowed the screaming over the mixed-race family in the Cheerios commercial, although that’s happening as well, of course.

    I went on to ask him a few related questions and got very candid responses in return:

    Rob: Did you catch any blowback when you announced that you and your wife were getting married?

    Chris: None at all, but mainly because my mom was NOT a raging bigot, and she and my brother were really the only family I had at the time.

    My grandmother was senile and living with relatives in Brigham City (north Utah) who probably would have disapproved, had I said anything to them. But I had cut all ties with the Mormons years earlier.

    Rob: What’s it like being a mixed family in the (top part of) The South? Do you find difficulties in dealing with some/many neighbors?  And how about raising a mixed-raced kid in the south? 

    Chris: I was a bit worried, but no problems that I’ve experienced. My son looks like a little Aryan (genetics are weird), and we’re in a fairly liberal spot anyway, just north of Chapel Hill. Lelia has run into some anti-Hispanic stuff at some of the stores, when she was there alone.

    Neighbors – our neighborhood is really damned diverse. We moved in partially because there was another Brasillian woman living in the neighborhood, and we met a couple who were African-American and African-Panamanian, and they introduced us to all of THEIR friends…

    About raising a mixed-race kid – I think I WOULD be concerned about it if Marcus looked more Brasillian. I’d certainly feel like I had to warn him to be careful. Even in an area this relatively-liberal, there are a lot of Tea Party types. As it is, though, I’m more worried about him looking so typically white-American when he visits Brasil. Huge kidnapping risk, in some ways.

  • And, what was quite possibly the most expressive – and tongue-in-cheek comment – on the commercial came from my friend, Maddox:

    FUCK YOU, COCA-COLA! I want all the singing in my commercials to be done in English while I watch African-Americans play a game that evolved from Rugby on my Japanese TV!

    Those familiar with his website know that Maddox has a keen eye for the goings-on in American culture and is unafraid to challenge them head-on. While his commentary is often acerbic and brusque (and usually humorous), he doesn’t pulls his punches when skewering those things that he finds absurd and ridiculous.

America really is beautiful, despite the thoughts – or possibly the unthinking, knee-jerk reactions – of some of its citizens. Take time to explore it and the documents that were created to make this the country that we call “home.”

Also, take time to reflect on the fact that we’re not just making Black History.
Or White History.
Or Asian-American History.
Or Hispanic-American History.
Or Arabic-American History.

We’re making our collective history; let’s make sure that it’s a story worthy of being told.

Namaste.

1 – Opinions expressed in the comments above were those of the commenters and do not necessarily represent their employers or any other agency.