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Home » Another white arbiter of Blackness is heard from

Another white arbiter of Blackness is heard from

The New Neo Posted on by

Apparently, the proper metric of Blackness is attendance at NBA games. Who knew?

And Clarence Thomas has been tested and found wanting on that dimension by Rex Chapman, who also writes: “Clarence Thomas would last 20-30 seconds in an NBA locker room.” What is Chapman suggesting would happen in that locker room? Would Thomas be beaten up? Ridiculed? Flee in fear at his lack of authentic Blackness? What?

In other breaking news, “wise latina” Sotomayor has never been photographed eating a tortilla, at least as far as I can tell. Therefore her bona fides must be suspect.

However, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s cultural Jewish identity is safe:

The visits included a stop at the New York deli Russ & Daughters at 179 East Houston St. Apart from appreciating the pickled herring, bagels, and lox, young Ruth could see something she’d never seen anywhere else—a business that proudly proclaimed in its name and its signage that it would be passed on to daughters and not sons. The notion, which might not seem revolutionary today, was novel for a girl growing up in the 1930s and ’40s. Before she ever heard the word “feminist,” Russ & Daughters helped shape Ginsburg’s idea of what’s possible for women.

That’s actually rather interesting. However, “Russ & Daughters” was indicating a present reality, not an intention to pass a business on to daughters in the future. And it turns out that Russ was not making a feminist statement:

n 1920, Russ opened his store at the current location of 179 East Houston Street. In 1933, he renamed the business “Russ and Daughters” after making his three daughters, Hattie, Anne, and Ida, partners in the store. Historically, businesses typically took on the name “and sons”, but since Russ and his wife Bella had only daughters, his business became Russ & Daughters. However, Russ was not a feminist ahead of his time. For him, getting his daughters into the business was not a matter of women’s rights, but a matter of parnosa, or surviving to make a business. As he put it, he was concerned with Vi nempt men parnosa, meaning ‘From where do we take our living.’ According to Hattie, she and the other daughters had all worked in the store “since they were 8 years old” on weekends, fishing out the herring fillets from the pickle barrels. Once each one of them finished high school, they all worked full-time. Moreover, Russ kept the store open seven days a week…

In 2008 The Jews of New York documentary premiered on PBS, featuring three generations of the Russ & Daughters family (Anne Russ Federman and Hattie Russ Gold, the two surviving Russ daughters; Mark Russ Federman, then the proprietor; Niki Russ Federman; and Josh Russ Tupper). The documentary tells, among other things, the story of Russ & Daughters from the early 1900s to the (then) present. The third daughter, Ida, had died.

Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes from the House That Herring Built, by Mark Russ Federman (grandson of Joel Russ), with an introduction by Calvin Trillin, was published in 2013.

[ADDENDUM: See this for more on Clarence Thomas and blackness.]

Comments

Another white arbiter of Blackness is heard from — 32 Comments

  3. Sports reporters are unusually stupid, even for reporters. Now that they’re all woke, they frequently and freely say the quiet part out loud all the time, completely inadvertently and in a mad, slavering, sweaty quest to curry favor with their heroes.

  4. At an average of $95 for one NBA ticket or $40 per pound for some (really good) smoked fish, regular pursuit of either of these hobbies today would be less a sign of cultural commitment than higher-than-normal disposable income.

  6. Chapman’s weird attacks on interracial marriages like Thomas and Daniel Cameron are way worse than the NBA stuff.

    The fact that they bring that up all the time is really weird. Probably the two most powerful black women in America right now (Harris and Jackson) are married to white men.

    The left has stewed in racism for so long that they can’t even stay consistent.

  7. At an average of $95 for one NBA ticket or $40 per pound for some (really good) smoked fish, regular pursuit of either of these hobbies today would be less a sign of cultural commitment than higher-than-normal disposable income.

    Perhaps in NYC, but Detroit’s “Ma Cohen’s” brand is $21.99/lb for whole, smoked Great Lakes whitefish and it is very good.

    The best smoked fish I’ve had was from a roadside stand in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where the proprietor smoked the whitefish, salmon, and rainbow trout himself.

  8. AMartel
    Sports reporters are unusually stupid, even for reporters,

    Keith Olbermann started out as a sports reporter.

  9. Gringo,

    And back in the 1990s Olberman on ESPN was a brilliant writer and anchor on ESPN. He’s a clown now but him and Dan Patrick were very good on SportsCenter.

  10. I guess it’s ‘confession through projection’ with many of these leftist media types.

    All they see is race so that means everybody else does also.

    The last couple of weeks have seen countless examples of media types saying ‘well the right would think differently about guns if blacks were buying them legally’ and that Maine school voucher SCOTUS decision brought out ‘the right would think differently if it was going to Muslim schools’ crowd.

    They are so insulated that they have no clue what normal people on the right actually believe in.

  11. Probably the two most powerful black women in America right now (Harris and Jackson)

    Harris’ ancestry is about 25% West African, if that. She grew up in Toronto in the home of her (East Indian) mother.

  12. By the way, speaking of blackness and Clarence Thomas:

    Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, a small, predominantly black community near Savannah founded by freedmen after the Civil War. He was the second of three children born to M. C. Thomas, a farm worker, and Leola “Pigeon” Williams, a domestic worker. They were the descendants of slaves, and the family spoke Gullah as a first language. Thomas’s earliest known ancestors were slaves named Sandy and Peggy, who were born in the late 18th century and owned by wealthy planter Josiah Wilson of Liberty County, Georgia. Thomas’s father left the family when Thomas was two years old. Though Thomas’s mother worked hard, she was sometimes paid only pennies per day and struggled to earn enough money to feed the family, and she was sometimes forced to rely on charity. After a house fire left them homeless, Thomas and his younger brother Myers were taken to live in Savannah with his maternal grandparents, Myers and Christine (née Hargrove) Anderson.

    Thomas then experienced amenities such as indoor plumbing and regular meals for the first time. Myers Anderson had little formal education but built a thriving fuel oil business that also sold ice. Thomas has called Anderson “the greatest man I have ever known.” When Thomas was 10, Anderson started taking the family to help at a farm every day from sunrise to sunset. Anderson believed in hard work and self-reliance, and he counseled the children to “never let the sun catch you in bed.” He also impressed upon his grandsons the importance of a good education…

    Raised Catholic, Thomas attended the predominantly black St. Pius X High School for two years before transferring to St. John Vianney’s Minor Seminary on the Isle of Hope, where he was among few black students. He also briefly attended Conception Seminary College, a Roman Catholic seminary in Missouri. No one in Thomas’s family had attended college. Thomas has said that he left the seminary in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He had overheard another student say after the shooting, “Good, I hope the son of a bitch died”, and did not think the church did enough to combat racism.

    At a nun’s suggestion, Thomas enrolled at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, as a sophomore transfer student. While there, Thomas helped found the Black Student Union. He once joined a walkout of the school after some black students were punished while white students went undisciplined for the same violation. Some of the priests negotiated with the protesting black students to reenter the school. As a student, Thomas attended anti-war marches and witnessed the 1970 Harvard Square riots. He has credited these for his disillusionment with leftist movements and his turn toward conservatism.

  13. Gringo, exactly. Olbermann is the quintessential sports reporter. Loudly and vehemently wrong about everything and totally, obliviously out of his depth.

  14. Just earlier this week, Olbermann referred to a female Supreme Court justice as a “paralegal.”

  15. About Russ and Daughters: Another factor in that era was the fact that inheritance taxes on a family business could be severe. Cutting the children into the biz helps reduce taxes generally.

  16. Rex Chapman writes: “Clarence Thomas would last 20-30 seconds in an NBA locker room.”

    That may well be true, in that rather than being beat up, it would be demanded he leave, as being unwelcome. Which speaks to the character and ignorance of overpaid NBA players. They would be in the presence of one of the greatest living Americans alive. Among black men, his only rival being Thomas Sowell. They wouldn’t recognize Clarence Thomas’ greatness because their cultural preconceptions prevent it.

    Here Thomas Sowell lays it out; https://youtu.be/wuhYEsxDTlA

  17. Just earlier this week, Olbermann referred to a female Supreme Court justice as a “paralegal.”

    Which is an insult so cack-handed you’d expect it of an elementary school child and hardly anyone else. The media does not select for intelligence.

  18. Isn’t it amazing how Thomas is African American while Obama and Harris are not only not but are from slaveowning WASP families.

  19. Clarence Thomas is a big problem for certain people.
    Their mantra seems to be, “if he were an authentic Black Man, how could he (whatever)?”.
    I have to believe that most of his attackers have no knowledge of his early years, and how he rose to his present position. But, ignorance and loquaciousness seem to go hand in hand. Some might say that the combination equals idiocy.

  20. OldTexan:

    I can almost guarantee they know nothing of his early life. And I would also bet that if they knew it wouldn’t make a particle of difference to them.

  21. I bet he would last longer in the locker room than Miles Bridges’ wife.

  22. 50 shades of South Africa (i.e. Mandela’s Xhosa vs Zulu), Rwanda (i.e. Hutu vs Tutsi), Kenya (i.e. elite vs deplorables), Germany (i.e. national socialists with diversity amendments vs Jews), Planned Parenthood and planned parent/hood (i.e. human rites), etc., where white special and peculiar interests leveraged domestic diversity [dogma] (e.g. racism, ageism) to cancel their competitors, excuse or ignore aborticides, typically to secure resources, steer the vote, etc.

  23. I take the “would last” bit to refer to getting beat up. Which should be kind of a shocking thing to suggest about NBA players. Does he mean they would just naturally beat the hell out of someone who offended them? If that’s what he means, why isn’t he being “called out” for racism?

    This makes me think of an exchange I saw on Facebook several years ago, in which a very white male leftist, who makes much of his non-racism, was taunting the mother of two Trump-supporting young white men about what would happen to them if they ventured into a poor black neighborhood. So in order to enjoy the prospect of the young white men being punished for their presumed racism he was assuming that young black men will be violent.

  24. except for shaq, maybe that bosnian player, who in the nba isn’t a bone thug, lets be real here, they all bought ‘the hands up don’t shoot’ proto blm narrative, look at how thomas was depicted in confirmation with that disreputable jackalope, who played megyns father on suits,

    now cameron and thomas I value more highly then mcconnell or kemp for instance,

  25. Men, women, and “our Posterity” are from Earth. Feminists are from Venus. Masculinists are from Mars. Social progressives are from Uranus.

  32. Strange for a man who was so drug-addicted that he shoplifted Apple products straight from the store to take a swipe at one of the greatest legal thinkers alive.

    This is what happens when you grab the ticket and sell out. When Matt Jones, or management at CNN, or whomever, says jump, Rex now has to say “how high”.

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