Tag Archives: race

12.08.16
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Totally Unacceptable Cabinet Picks: A Quick Rundown

In Trump’s ludicrous and disgustingly successful campaign, there was a pretty obvious dark strategy: be so terrible and so dishonest that the media couldn’t keep up. What was awful one day was subsumed the next by something else terrible, until it just became sort of white noise.

Now, I don’t know if this was genius; Trump is a genuinely awful and dishonest guy who does awful and dishonest things as a matter of course. He can’t help it. But he also knows the media, and knows how to distract them, and knows that being terrible wins (in business and reality TV and now, finally and fully, our politics, which have become a mix of his first two vulgar arts), because your opponents are just exhausted.

Anyway, I feel like that might sort of be his strategy with the cabinets. There are at least three picks so far which I have thought “this is the hill on which the Dems must die or nothing matters.”

  • Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who was named after Jefferson Davis, like his daddy and his daddy before him. Attorney General. Hates civil rights. Celebrates the end of the VRA. Wants to continue voter suppression. Will gut civil rights divisions, ignore right-wing racial militias. A dream come true for both the Klan and the alt-right. Can’t be allowed his position.
  • Scott Pruitt, for EPA. “Pruitt has been an ardent opponent of these efforts for years. He calls himself the “leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda” and has long insisted that states can often regulate pollution better than the federal government can.” If the environment means anything at all, if we aren’t just going to rip up everything so that companies can squeee profit out of our air and land and water, and our bodies, then he can’t be allowed this position.
  • Andrew Pudzler, Labor. See prior post. Hates workers. Thinks that paying people as little as possible is moral. Doesn’t think that the minimum wage should rise about even $9, and would probably want to do away with it altogether.

And that’s not counting Mary Fallin for Interior, whose idea of running our land and parks is to throw open the doors and say “take what you want, guys!” Another disaster, both ecologically and for the idea of a common good (and who thinks the US didn’t build Oklahoma).  I’m sure I’m missing some.

So what to do? Do you fight all of these? You sort of have to, right? But will the Dems be too scared of “they are being obstructionist even though they accused Republicans of the same thing!” Do we fight these all? Or are we going to fall victim to exhaustion? To me, we fight. If liberalism means anything–hell, if the idea of a common good, and a sense that we work for and with each other–means anything, none of these choices are acceptable.

The thing is, like with Trump, I don’t know if exhaustion is a planned strategy. Like Trump, they really are all just this awful.

11.18.16
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Racism is in Sessions!

 

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“Now, I may just be a simple country bigot…”

 

Remember all the “give Trump a chance” people? They’re wrong.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Senator Jeff Sessions, a conservative from Alabama who became a close adviser after endorsing him early in his campaign, to be the attorney general of the United States, according to officials close to the transition.

Jeffery Beauregard Sessions is the closest thing the Senate has to an open racist; as it is, he’s just-barely buried it under the thinnest veneer. But he is, at heart, a race man, and it is clear what Trump’s animating governing principle will be: cater to white anger and white backlash.

Sessions was rejected as a US attorney for being racist. But he’s gotten everyone back. Thanks to Trump, and the economic anxiety he’s trying to fix.

08.30.16
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Colson Whitehead’s Slavery Novel “The Underground Railroad”: A Ferocious History of the Present

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If you want to read a really insightful and incisive review of Colson Whitehead’s deeply disturbing and sneakily-complex new novel, The Underground Railroad, you could do a lot worse than reading Adam Gopnik’s review of a new book on the Attica uprising in last week’s New Yorker. In talking about the slaughter that ensued when the state police, national guard and (tellingly) other prison guards took back the jail from the nearly all-black inmates, Gopnik writes:

In a curious way, the psychology of the (almost exclusively white) troopers and guards, more than the ideology of the inmates, seems most haunting now, as part of the permanent picture of American fixations. The inmates were doing what anyone would do in their situation: having seen a protest turn unexpectedly into a revolt that was sure to be short-lived, they desperately improvised a way to keep their dignity and be heard, to avoid the worst punishment and get some small reforms. Their occasionally overblown rhetoric was the act of men who, stripped of dignity, try to reclaim it. But the troopers and guards retaking the prison were indulging an orgy of racist violence neither ordered nor wholly explicable. There was no need for them to conduct a massacre to reassert their authority. They had all the firepower; the prisoners were armed only with homemade knives; the guards had control of the yard within minutes. Nor were they, so far as anyone can detect, under direct commands to kill. In an American tale already known fully to Mark Twain, a white ethnic proletariat could distinguish itself as superior only by its ability to be brutal to a still more subordinate class of color. When its members were denied their exercise of this “right,” they turned crazy and violent.

If you want to learn more about the novel, look at any Blue Lives Matter Facebook group, flip to a Trump rally, or read some hot takes on Colin Kaepernick. These will tell you as much about Whitehead’s book as any discussion of the past, because, while it is meticulously detailed, and unflinching in its cruelty, Whitehead is describing an American obsession with race, with oppression, and with the assertion of might. The novel isn’t a metaphor for today– it isn’t secretly about Michael Brown or Garfield Park– but it is all the more harrowing because of that. It doesn’t need to be. The story barely changes.

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08.26.16
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The Super-Racism Behind Trump’s “Appeal” To Black Voters

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Pictured: The Outreach Brigade

This has been Trump’s “pivot week”, a transparently phony attempt to pretend his campaign isn’t fueled entirely by white anger, and hasn’t been one long sustained howl designed to yodel bigots out of the woodwork. Hillary did a good job with her speech yesterday making sure that no one can forget that the alt-right misogynist racist part of his campaign isn’t just one aspect; it is the driving force. So Trump has pretended, of course, that the Democrats are the real racists.

This started last week when he asked black voters what they had to lose in voting for him.

“What do you have to lose? What do you have to lose? You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good. You have no jobs — 58 percent of your youth is unemployed,” Trump said on Friday in Dimondale, Mich., a mostly white community near Lansing. “What the hell do you have to lose?”

He’s also talked about crime, and how he would stop it so people wouldn’t get shot, and he would do so by making the police super-empowered, which might not be what the black community totally wants to hear right now, but regardless. Also, some African-Americans took exception to his idea that all their lives resemble area where even Robocops fear to tread. This is his outreach.

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08.18.16
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#AmericasMerkel: Trump Talks White Nationalism

 

Pictured: Trump Towers

 

Confused by Trump’s insistence that Hillary Clinton will be “America’s Merkel”, someone who is generally considered a pretty strong and resolute leader, easily the most powerful in all of Europe? It’s not just because her and Putin don’t get along (although it’s probably a bit of that), and it isn’t just because of rank misogyny (though it’s also very much that). It’s because he gets his talking points directly from white nationalist sites like Stormfront and VDare.com!

Think Progress has the scoop.

To white nationalist communities that fervently support Trump, Merkel has been a popular villain. Sites like the Daily Stormer, the White Genocide Project, American Renaissance, and The White Resister have posted constantly about her since the Syrian refugee crisis began escalating earlier this year. They have accused her of making a “deliberate attempt to turn Germany from a majority White country into a minority White country.” They have called her a “crazy childless bitch,” “Anti-White Traitor,” and “patron saint of terrorists.” They have asked in articles about her, “Why would you allow a woman to run a country, unless you were doing it as a joke?”

This is not a coincidence. You don’t hire the Breitbart guy and parrot an obscure line of attack about a leader Americans generally like, if they even know at all, without being intimately linked to white nationalism. Trump’s campaign grows more and more openly and flagrantly racist. What he’s stirred up won’t go away for a long, long time, and will deeply poison our politics for many years, but a unified front against him and a huge election defeat will help to tamp it down. It is literally the only moral duty we have as voters.