By Benjamin T. Moore, Jr.

MONKEY DUST: (noun)

Mythical powder thrown into the air to obfuscate, confuse and blind one’s adversaries thus allowing retreat and or an easy escape.

Buckle up. For some this may be a bumpy ride. Without a doubt, the election of Barak Obama has brought the subject of race relations to the front pages like we haven’t seen since the days of Dr. Martin Luther King.

While the true state of race relations is nothing new to people of color, what has happened is, white people have suddenly been forced to face a reality they’d convinced themselves no longer existed. The shock of discovering they were wrong has thrown many into a tailspin.

Longing for the “Good Ol’ Days.

We’ve had Paula Deen reminiscing about the “Good Ol’ Days” and wanting to have an antebellum wedding served by Black people dressed as Slaves. No shame in her game. She actually made these statements during an interview with a reporter. Imagine the outrage if she’d said she wanted to have a Holocaust themed wedding served by Jews dressed in stripped pajamas with the guests dressed as Nazi officers.

Multi-millionaire posing as a backwoods hick.

Then there’s Phil – Duck Dynasty – Robertson. He knows Black people were happy before Civil Rights. How does he know this? Because he’s “white trash” and he was with the Black people hoeing fields and picking cotton. He heard some sing and saw some laughing. This for him was proof that Black people were happy before Civil Rights. Evidently, we’ve all stopped singing and laughing. Did you catch what Phil Robertson implied? It probably snuck right past you.

Phil Robertson equated being “white trash” – his words – with being equal to Black people. Thus, normal white people – whatever that means – are by definition above Black people… but “white trash?” “White trash,” presumably poor white people who are living the “hard scrabble life,” these white people are equal to Black people. Put another way, any white person who associates with Black people is by Robertson’s definition, “white trash.” Are you with me now?

How Monkey Dust Works

Enter one Cliven Bundy. This fool has been free loading off the taxpayers for over 20 years by grazing his cattle on federal land without paying the range fees other ranchers have been paying. Thus far he’s racked up over $1.1 million dollars in range fees which he refuses to pay.

If this fool had a working brain cell, it would die of loneliness.

Not only is he grazing his cattle on federal land, the land in question has been set aside as a preserve for an endangered tortoise. So, we have a deadbeat tax evader who is trespassing on federal land who has been getting something for nothing for the past 20 years. It would seem cut and dried. Throw his ass in jail, take his property, sell it and recoup what he owes the American people. Isn’t this the treatment you’d expect if you did the same thing?

Out of the blue, Cliven Bundy decides to tell us “what he knows about the Negro.” What the Hell??? Where’d that come from? What have Black people got to do with his issues? He launches into a diatribe about Black people on welfare. Here’s a fellow that for the last 20 years has been living on welfare to the tune of $1.1 million dollars. The moment he threw “Monkey Dust” into the air, we all forgot about the real issues – his crimes – and focused on racism. Since there are significantly more white people on welfare, than any other race, it would have been more instructive for him to tell us all about white people.

The Curious Case Of Donald Sterling.

One of the most Kafkaesque things I’ve ever witnessed is the curious case of ex-Clippers owner, Donald Sterling. Here is an 80 year old white man who believes himself to be Jewish – more on this later – who is having an affair with a 31 year old woman of Black and Latino ethnicity. What could possibly go wrong with this? This is fertile ground for all kinds of problems without ever injecting race. Oh, it gets better!

Donald Sterling and his Black/Latina mistress.

Sterling is caught on tape – a lot of confusion here because it seems he was aware he was being taped – telling her that he doesn’t want her seen in public with Black people. It is perfectly fine by him for her to take them to bed… just don’t be seen in public with them. You know? I never did that whole drug thing in my youth, but I suspect a hit of LSD might help make sense of this. When reality gets twisted, often the only way to understand it, is to get just as twisted yourself.

What? It’s alright for Sterling to be seen in public with Black people… Hell! He’s dating one! Yet, he doesn’t want the same Black woman he’s dating to be seen with other Black people or bring them to his Clipper games. No, I think it’s going to take something even more mind altering than LSD to make sense of this.

The irony is that he calls himself Jewish and like many, has no idea that true Hebrews are Black.

Racism

Race is such a convoluted topic because there really is no factual definition of race or ethnicity. We started by identifying one another by geography. Wherever you were born is what you were. How you looked had nothing to do with it. This is why when you ask white people about their heritage you get a mathematics equation with geography thrown in. I’m 1/4th Welsh, 2/5ths German on my mother’s side and 3/8ths Italian. What the Hell does that mean? Stand them beside a Black person and ask them the same question and they’re likely to simply say, “I’m white.”

Did you know, prior to the African Slave Trade, your race was determined by your father? If your father was Greek and your mother was Chinese, you were Greek. Didn’t matter what you looked like. Teresa Heinz Kerry is African. Charlize Theron is African. Both women were born in Africa. When you point to so called “white people” born in Africa, suddenly it becomes all about skin color.

Evolution And Racism

There really is only one race of man on this planet. It’s the human race. Skin color is determined by geographical location. Populations found closer to the equator are darker. Dark skin is an evolutionary adaptation to protect us from solar radiation. If you took a white population and transplanted them to a location close to the equator, without intermarrying with other people living in that area. Within 16 generations or less, they’d all be Black. Think about that for a moment. Unless you’re naive enough to believe that geography somehow confers some sort of superiority upon a person, this entire race business is just a matrix of control to keep certain people wealthy and in power.

Your skin color is determined by how close to the equator your ancestors lived.

The worst part of racism? We are squandering the only real resource on this planet which is the human mind. The mind which held the secrets to immortality might have been born into a body in Sub-Saharan Africa. The mind which held the key to faster than light travel may have been born into a body in the Sudan. Because we have devalued these people, we may have doomed the human race to extinction. Racism… what a silly method of self-destruction.