Senate "Race" Relations (was "U.S. Society and Black Men")

W.T.F.

 

This is incorrect, actually. So long as the white robes don't have political campaign material printed on them, racists can wear anything they like while presenting an armed, threatening presence at polling stations. They'll probably wear camo, since white robes are super old-timey and racists don't feel a need to cover their faces anymore, but they could wear the old robes if they wanted.

 

**** that guy in particular

 

"Then why do you act like one?" is an appropriate response.

 

Do these tweeters also use the "only a couple of bad eggs" argument? Yeah, that's outdated and not true.

 

"before the video"? They claimed they found the kid wandering the streets, which was 100% untrue. What the **** could it possibly matter what happened 'before the video'?

 

They're just desperate and looking for ways to misdirect. Since they have no proof and keep saying "before the video", they should kindly bugger off.

 

Ah, right. The old "The shooting victim had an unpaid parking ticket, so why focus on what the police did or didn't do?" schtick.

 

About time to treat the police as an organization like the Nazi SS: criminalize them.

 

Post-election wretchedness incoming. Forgive my "incisive commentary" on the obvious. I'm just trying to survive here like everyone else.

It's too early to start the garment-rending over a second Trump victory, but that ****-show of a man is doing far better than he should by any sane measure. For some reason, the media is playing the blushing maiden and is referring to support for Trump as related to "the economy." I don't know why they bother. Covid--and the mismanagement of it--has screwed the actual economy, it's just that the government keeps shoveling cash into the stock market to keep it stumbling on, zombie-like. There are indeed a subset of older people who rely on their 401k's for financial security, and it is important to them that "stonks arrow go uppppp" at all times, by any means necessary. I guess you could throw the CEO's and major shareholders of publicly-held corporations into that group too, for somewhat different reasons. But how many single-issue voters focused on the stock market are we talking about? Not nearly enough to make a credible showing in a national election, that's for sure. "The economy" is as transparent a figleaf as "law and order."

The one campaign promise that Trump has delivered on in spades is the one he likes to pretend he didn't make--the protection and promotion of raw bigotry. It's just straight-up hatred, for Black and Brown people, for LGBTQ+ people, for non-Christians, for migrants, for the one-eyed witch on the hill who gave my cow the Eye, for anyone and anything that gives your average xenophobe a case of the vapors.

Hatred and fear of the Other is something that exists in all cultures to a greater or lesser extent. Europe and Anglophone Oceania loathe their dark-skinned Muslim migrants, the Muslims themselves have problems with other groups of Muslims, the Han Chinese detest the Uighurs, SE Asia and Africa have their own endemic hatreds, based on religion and language and skin color, frequently exacerbated by generations of Imperial subjugation.

But the U.S. is something else . . . where else on earth are you going to find a population that can forgive 200,000+ needless deaths--of civilians, in "peacetime" (for domestic purposes)--just so long as the neo-Nazis get to stick it to the Blacks?

I always knew that we had a lot of racism here, but I thought that it was mostly the ignorant kind. You know--people who live way out in the sticks in all-white towns who have never met a Black person or a Jew or an uncloseted gay person, and so they fear what they don't know. It never occurred to me to ask what might entice someone to live way out in the sticks in an all-white town to begin with. Also, while some people do fear the unfamiliar, that kind of fear only goes so far. Most Americans have never met an ichthyologist, or someone over 7.5 feet tall, or someone whose grandfather was alive during the Civil War. Yet they don't stalk those people through their neighborhoods and shoot them given the slightest excuse.

Even among nations of bigoted people, the U.S. is not normal. We're out there on the tail end of the bell curve with apartheid South Africa and pogrom-loving Tsarist Russia. (Most of Hitler's Germany did not particularly hate the Jews. You did get folks' attention if you told them they could have the jobs, houses, and personal property of Jews who just suddenly "weren't there" anymore, though.) The U.S. likes to imagine it's better than, say, 19th-century Russia, because we don't (currently) give official decrees that our minority populations must live in partitioned-off areas where we can conveniently corner them and kill them whenever social pressures get us feeling antsy. The truth is that we just let the banks and the police do all that.

The last 4 years have really removed the trappings of civility theater that have allowed the more privileged among us to go quietly about our lives since the Civil Rights era ended. Being white and under 50 myself, I was not at all expecting the level of moral and psychological rot that the Trump era exposed. It's like knowing your house has bugs, but then opening up a wall and finding the entire contents of the Oogie Boogie Man's burlap sack squirming between the 2 by 4's.

I wish I had some idea of how to make the U.S. more like the "beacon of freedom" it likes to imagine itself, and less like ::gestures vaguely:: this. I really don't have any ideas, though. South Africa is majority Black, so instituting actual democracy there appears to be squashing racist institutions. Russia's history of Tsarist pogroms eventually led to its history of Soviet pogroms, and then the Nazis showed up, so obviously that was fabulous. I guess there was Inquisitorial Spain, which remained Inquisitorial Spain until 1830 or something terrifying like that. For reasons that should be pretty obvious, this did not serve the best interests of Spain.

Horrible nations that do horrible things to their own people tend not to come to good ends. Logic suggests that the situation is even worse when certain citizens are singled out and abused for weird cultural reasons that have nothing to do with the interests of government, although I'm not sure how much difference it really makes. Murdering a million dissidents in some rebel province probably destabilizes your nation just as much as murdering a million citizens with moles on their faces because the magical demons who live in people's chimneys hate face moles.

Maybe the thing to do is to all become accelerationsists and commit terrorist acts in an attempt to destroy the nightmare of a social experiment that is the United States. I don't really know. I kind of suspect that "vote blue no matter who" is not going to cut it, though.

tl;dr: Why is the U.S. full of such racist ****s? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

 

Because of the lost cause mentality and Donald Trump bringing them to the top

 

Also because the current iteration of the Democratic party is too centrist and have their heads up their butts. Unlike appleseed, I don't necessarily think this means the Democratic party is finished. They just need more people like AOC or Ilhan Omar to influence it. Or, better yet, dismantle the two party system and form some new political parties. This country has done it before in the distant past, we can do it again, I think.

 

Oh but the problem is the third parties would become the two party system again.

The Democratic Party needs to take a hard look at itself.

 

That’s not it. Democrats did poorly because they thought Biden was too socialist. Minorities swung harder to Trump, while Biden won more whites.

 

I hate to say it but I think a majority of whites are racist if you didn’t vote in this election it means you’re just OK with Trump unless of course you weren’t eligible to vote.

 

But trends also matter. Biden picked up more white votes in the Midwest swing states, but Trump really expanded his support among black and brown voters. And if Trump can do that after 4 years of him, just imagine what a Ted Cruz would do.

 

This doesn't tell the whole story. First off, Latinos and Whites aren't two distinct groups, they intersect a bit. But most importantly, while it's true that "oppose trump" more unifies non-whites, that's it. Plenty of POC are either conservative, liberal, or socialist and pretty divided.

 

There have been a lot of finger pointing at black men over 20% of them going for Trump (black women are under 10%). How could they?!

THAT'S STILL 80% GOING AGAINST TRUMP. That's a massive difference, it's harder to get more monolithic than that. And that's during a down year.

How much more one sided voting can white people demand while the majority of white people are voting for Trump? White people should stop pointing the finger at 20% of black men, and point that finger at themselves, instead.

Among black people, this holds up beyond Trump. Black people have turned out overwhelmingly for Democrats for a long time. Pretty sure it Latinos are consistently Democratic too, just not to the same degree as black people, but still much more than white people.

Here's an image from Pew:



This "close divide" doesn't exist among black people, and there's a clear gap among Latinos. The close divide, to the point of overlapping at points, is only among white people.

Uh...what could Ted Cruz do? What makes you think Cruz would receive the same support?