{"id":2476,"date":"2016-05-19T19:29:37","date_gmt":"2016-05-19T19:29:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattralston.net\/?p=2476"},"modified":"2016-05-19T19:57:51","modified_gmt":"2016-05-19T19:57:51","slug":"barry-bonds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/rant\/barry-bonds\/","title":{"rendered":"Barry Bonds N Bomb Situation Raises So Many Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/P8T4c-4WCks\" width=\"600\" height=\"420\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This Barry Bonds Brentwood prep school N-bomb development is a veritable cornucopia of convoluted conflict, intertangling privilege and race and standing them all on their heads and lashing them with\u00a0the whip of irony.<\/p>\n<p>For those unaware, Barry Bonds&#8217; daughter attends a $27,000 a year prep school in Brentwood. Video recently surfaced of a bunch of what we are to presume are her fellow\u00a0students at what looked like\u00a0an awesome party chanting the lyrics to A$AP Ferg&#8217;s fairly terrible\u00a0song <em>Dump Dump<\/em>. The video edits in some stats about how there are very few black students at the school and selects the portion of the song in which the kids rap along:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;I fucked yo bitch nigga. I fucked yo bitch.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Bonds tweeted the video along with the caption &#8220;I am sad I had to see this at my daughter&#8217;s school. #racism #suspension #fixit.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a lot going on here so I&#8217;ll just jump right in. First of all, being a white person who&#8217;s a fan of rap, I&#8217;ve found it&#8217;s usually perfectly acceptable to quote rap lyrics or rap along to them\u00a0in the company of black people. One thing to keep in mind is you must drop the R, meaning you&#8217;re saying <em>nigga<\/em> and not <em>nigger<\/em>. The Hard R has an uncanny bite to it coming from a white person\u00a0and this is an important distinction to keep in mind.<\/p>\n<p>If\u00a0a song for some reason contains a Hard R, you&#8217;d have to look at the context and consider mumbling it. In Bob Dylan&#8217;s protest song <em>Hurricane<\/em>, which is about\u00a0the racist conspiracy to convict black\u00a0boxer Rubin\u00a0&#8220;Hurricane&#8221; Carter\u00a0, he says:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;And to the black folks he was just a crazy nigger. No one doubted that he pulled the trigger.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If you know all the lyrics to that song it would be stupid to leave out that one word. Clearly it has a lot of power. In this instance, Bob Dylan appears to be attempting to harness that power for good. (At the time he wrote the song Carter was still in prison, and the awareness Dylan raised most likely had some small part in setting him free.)<\/p>\n<p>On the contrary let&#8217;s say you\u00a0were bumping some neo Nazi punk rock or explicitly racist\u00a0David Allen\u00a0Coe song containing that word. You can&#8217;t sing along and assume this is your chance to say it with impunity. Then again if that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re listening to you most likely say\u00a0it all the time and don&#8217;t hang out with black people.<\/p>\n<p>Nonetheless, these kids are quoting a song. A song they actually like. Racist people don&#8217;t usually memorize the lyrics to rap songs. Also, it&#8217;s a quote. How is this different from reading a passage of Huck Finn?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not trying to be the authority on when it&#8217;s acceptable\u00a0to drop and N-Bomb or not. I&#8217;m just pointing out that it&#8217;s entirely possible to not be a racist and say the word\u00a0<em>nigger<\/em> or <em>nigga<\/em>\u00a0and it&#8217;s entirely possible to be extremely racist and never say it.<\/p>\n<p>For example, your average white congressman in the South is racist as fuck. Not saying they all are. But your average one is. They don&#8217;t walk around saying it. Mark Twain was anti-slavery and mocked the ignorance of white southerners. He wrote a book with that word in it. So, there&#8217;s a distinction.<\/p>\n<p>It could be seen as progress that these kids don&#8217;t have a huge stigma about it. This party was on a boat. Whoever\u00a0recorded them on their phone, black or white,\u00a0was invited. If\u00a0the person was hiding in some bushes to bust their racist powwow that would be one thing. They didn&#8217;t feel they had anything to be ashamed about.\u00a0I&#8217;m guessing that douche\u00a0won&#8217;t be invited back.<\/p>\n<p>You could make a case, by the way, that A$AP Ferg is playing into a minstrelsy theme. I checked his Wikipedia page. He went to art school and as a teenager developed a clothing line. So, there&#8217;s that. The fact this music exists and is being ravenously consumed by rich white kids definitely points to some deep seated racism in our society.<\/p>\n<p>Yet I don&#8217;t think teenagers should be forced to go that deep with it. If you analyzed everything in our culture to that degree, it would mostly come out racist. I do think people like A$AP Ferg should partly share in whatever blame is being passed around, or at least be considered complicit.<\/p>\n<p>Now for the issue of privilege. I&#8217;m not saying Barry Bonds, as a black guy, is obligated to comment or take stands on the topic of racism. Yet, I read his whole twitter feed and this is the first time he&#8217;s had an opinion on the subject. There&#8217;s not one mention of Ferguson, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, even Donald Trump, nothing.<\/p>\n<p>I always assumed Bonds was a surly malcontent\u00a0but his twitter account is almost nauseatingly upbeat. It&#8217;s all about charity bike rides and how much he loves his kids and congratulating various athletes on their accomplishments and\u00a0wishing happy birthdays to Floyd Mayweather and Michael Jackson.<\/p>\n<p>His father was a professional baseball player. He clearly has had\u00a0a good life, and one would assume, with his kids attending $27,000 a year schools and all, that he&#8217;s doing pretty well. So well in fact, that he appears so insulated as to distinguish this high school party as a beacon of racism with all the shit that&#8217;s going on in 2016.<\/p>\n<p>Just like your level of racism doesn&#8217;t necessarily depend on your frequency of uttering the word, your privilege doesn&#8217;t necessarily depend on your skin tone. The unifying factor is now the almighty dollar.<\/p>\n<p>The video says the school has three black students. The school&#8217;s website says it&#8217;s 27 percent. They didn&#8217;t return my call to clarify the discrepancy. Still, I&#8217;m going to assume they don&#8217;t care about race whatsoever so long as you pony up the money.<\/p>\n<p>Which is why I found that if there is anything troubling about this video, and I&#8217;m not saying there is, it&#8217;s not these kids repeating the word\u00a0<em>nigga<\/em>. It&#8217;s that in a city where we have a homeless epidemic and where kids in\u00a0Inglewood don&#8217;t have text books or safe schools, these fucking kids have access to their own boat. I&#8217;m not saying there&#8217;s anything wrong with becoming wealthy through hard work\u00a0either. I&#8217;m just saying, it&#8217;s generally a troubling dichotomy when looked at from an outside perspective.<\/p>\n<p>So here you have Bonds, a person of privilege, who appears so aloof and narcissistic as to only notice racism when it applies to his extremely\u00a0privileged daughter, and\u00a0in a tangential way to put it generously.<\/p>\n<p>You have Bonds advocating that these students be suspended because they are repeating the lyrics to a song they like, at a party not affiliated with the school,\u00a0on a surreptitiously recorded video.<\/p>\n<p>The moral of the story, stay indoors and don&#8217;t say anything. That&#8217;s exactly how they want it. <em>They<\/em> being the miserable people on the left and right.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not buying the jolly twitter feed. Barry Bonds was and always has been an asshole. Go have tea with Tipper Gore. Nice sweater bro.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This Barry Bonds Brentwood prep school N-bomb development is a veritable cornucopia of convoluted conflict, intertangling privilege and race and standing them all on their heads and lashing them with\u00a0the whip of irony. For those unaware, Barry Bonds&#8217; daughter attends a $27,000 a year prep school in Brentwood. Video recently surfaced of a bunch of &#8230;<a class=\"post-readmore\" href=\"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/rant\/barry-bonds\/\">read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2484,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,192,5],"tags":[986],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2476"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2476"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2485,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2476\/revisions\/2485"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}