Agrippina wrote:As a child, and unaware of the history of slavery, and American history in general, I used to question why, if South Africa and the USA were settled by Europeans at about the same time, we hadn't reached the same level of sophistication and progress that the USA had.

[Reveal] Spoiler:

Then I grew up, got satellite television (or even television in general since we only got it in 1976), and learnt that it wasn't what I'd thought it was. By this time I'd been to the UK, and seen how an integrated country without separation by skin colour worked. Also while I was there I watched some American television, not much because we were busy doing touristy stuff and too tired for TV at night. What I saw amazed and confused me. There was the development that I was aware of being far superior to ours, on the one hand, and the racial issues on the other. At that time, in the wake the of moon landings and NASA looking at more probing of space, the culture and education standards were far superior to ours. I bought books there that I took home to my then toddler children, and my education began.

Before that I'd been a girl from small town South Africa, living in the big city, raising highly intelligent, and I now know, autistic children, who were thirsty for knowledge. I had another two, also autistic, after that trip, the last one, the one now living with me on disability due to his birth oxygen deprivation causing more co-morbidities than the autism did, one of the most intelligent people I've met in my life.(He never ceases to amaze me with his brilliance). We've now been through the age of CNN and Clinton, Bush jnr, Obama, and that other person, and I realise it was smoke and mirrors. I don't mean to disrespect those Americans who aren't dumb but boy, when I see the people who voted for that other person on television, I ask myself why I ever thought America was better! We were living through what the dumb people want to institute in the USA, and what Israel is doing to Palestine, and I'm seeing how people simply don't learn from history.

Education, reading, learning to teach yourself what you know you don't know: that there's a whole world outside that can advise you, tell you what works, and what doesn't work, and what's happening now is not going to work. Money isn't the answer to everything. In fact money is what ruins everything. What does work is to give every single person on the earth the chance to be the best they can be, and instead of accumulating, hoarding, money, hoard books, and read them, learn about the rest of the world. Teach children, make them learn how to live in a world without war, famine, and poverty. Use the warmongering money to create opportunities for those people who, through no fault of their own, were born in South Sudan, where's there's nothing but famine, war, raping and pillaging, while that man who shouldn't have been appointed to clean toilet, let alone be president, shits in a gold toilet.

I know what I'm talking about because in 1976 as I was approaching 30, I finally began my own education, and now as my life is ending, I see my kids on webinars with some of the great minds of our country, discussing the big issues. Not how to solve poverty, but the things we dream about: extending life beyond the limits we now accept, space settlement, mining asteroids, how to live in gravitational regions different from our own. This while the people I grew up with discuss whether a certain narcissistic stalker should've worn tights when she went out with the Queen. For fuck's sake, why are people so stupid when there's so much to learn that's a whole lot more interesting and important than whether or not some privileged arsehole should have his titles removed, or appointing people into high positions of power when they don't even understand the simple basics of viral transmission.

It's a world gone mad. My country lived through nationalism, apartheid, 90% of the population educated only enough to be servants, and it didn't work. Yet try to tell that to someone who thinks a MAGA hat is is the height of fashion, and that making money off shoes made by slave labour, while your father is president, is the way a brilliant businessperson becomes even richer without a single thought for the people locked in their factories to work until they drop. Thank old age that I'll be leaving this behind sooner than later, and that I now stay away from the news before it causes my head to explode.

mindhack wrote:Wonderful having you back here Agrippina, shooting from the hip your typical informed insightful rants. It’s always been a delight reading your contributions.

arugula2 wrote:Agrippina, catching up on your posts - lovely reading as ever, tell us when that blog post goes up.

Question: “leave the depot for the cemetery”… that’s a colloquialism? If so, what do you know about it, and when did you start using it?

The Biden administration is rolling out a new strategy to counter domestic terrorism. One of the initiative's top aims is to confront racism and bigotry -- long the primary drivers of homegrown extremism. Award-winning historian and author Kathleen Belew, a professor at the University of Chicago, speaks with Michel Martin about violence and militarization in American society and how to combat it.

The Cruel Logic of the Republican Party, Before and After Trump

Donald Trump has claimed credit for any number of things he benefited from but did not create, and the Republican Party’s reigning ideology is one of them: a politics of cruelty and exclusion that strategically exploits vulnerable Americans by portraying them as an existential threat, against whom acts of barbarism and disenfranchisement become not only justified but worthy of celebration. This approach has a long history in American politics. The most consistent threat to our democracy has always been the drive of some leaders to restrict its blessings to a select few.

This is why Joe Biden beat Mr. Trump but has not vanquished Trumpism. Mr. Trump’s main innovation was showing Republicans how much they could get away with, from shattering migrant families and banning Muslim travelers to valorizing war crimes and denigrating African, Latino and Caribbean immigrants as being from “shithole countries.” Republicans have responded with zeal, even in the aftermath of his loss, with Republican-controlled legislatures targeting constituencies they identify either with Democrats or with the rapid cultural change that conservatives hope to arrest. The most significant for democracy, however, are the election laws designed to insulate Republican power from a diverse American majority that Republicans fear no longer supports them. The focus on Mr. Trump’s — admittedly shocking — idiosyncrasies has obscured the broader logic of this strategy.

After more than a decade in which Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton provided fruitful targets for an audience fearful of cultural change, conservative media has struggled to turn the older white president who goes to Mass every Sunday into a compelling villain. Yet the apocalypse remains nigh, threatened by the presence of those Americans they consider unworthy of the name.

On Fox News, hosts warn that Democrats want to “replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the third world.” In outlets like National Review, columnists justify disenfranchisement of liberal constituencies on the grounds that “it would be far better if the franchise were not exercised by ignorant, civics-illiterate people.” Trumpist redoubts like the Claremont Institute publish hysterical jeremiads warning that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”

Under such an ideology, depriving certain Americans of their fundamental rights is not wrong but praiseworthy, because such people are usurpers.

*

The origin of this politics can arguably be found in the aftermath of the Civil War, when Radical Republicans sought to build a multiracial democracy from the ashes of the Confederacy. That effort was destroyed when white Southerners severed emancipated Black Americans from the franchise, eliminating the need to win their votes or respect their rights. The founders had embedded protections for slavery in the Constitution, but it was only after the abolition war, during what the historian Eric Foner calls the Second Founding, that nonracial citizenship became possible.

The former Confederates had failed to build a slave empire, but they would not accept the demise of white man’s government. As the former Confederate general and subsequent six-term senator from Alabama John T. Morgan wrote in 1890, democratic sovereignty in America was conferred upon “qualified voters,” and Black men, whom he accused of “hatred and ill will toward their former owners,” did not qualify and were destroying democracy by their mere participation. Disenfranchising them, therefore, was not merely justified but an act of self-defense protecting democracy against “Negro domination.”

In order to wield power as they wanted, without having to appeal to Black men for their votes, the Democratic Party and its paramilitary allies adopted a theory of liberty and democracy premised on exclusion. Such a politics must constantly maintain the ramparts between the despised and the elevated. This requires fresh acts of cruelty not only to remind everyone of their proper place but also to sustain the sense of impending doom that justifies these acts.

As the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote, years after the end of Reconstruction, Southern Democrats engaged in “intensive propaganda of white supremacy, Negrophobia and race chauvinism” to purge Black men from politics forever, shattering emerging alliances between white and Black workers. This was ruthless opportunism, but it also forged a community defined by the color line and destroyed one that might have transcended it.

The Radical Republicans believed the ballot would be the ultimate defense against white supremacy. The reverse was also true: Severed from that defense, Black voters were disarmed. Without Black votes at stake, the party of Lincoln was no longer motivated to defend Black rights.

*

Contemporary Republicans are far less violent and racist than the Democrats of the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age. But they have nevertheless adopted the same political logic, that the victories of the rival party are illegitimate, wrought by fraud, coercion or the support of ignorant voters who are not truly American. It is no coincidence that Mr. Obama’s rise to power began with a lyrical tribute to all that red and blue states had in common and that Mr. Trump’s began with him saying Mr. Obama was born in Kenya.

In this environment, cruelty — in the form of demonizing religious and ethnic minorities as terrorists, criminals and invaders — is an effective political tool for crushing one’s enemies as well as for cultivating a community that conceives of fellow citizens as a threat, resident foreigners attempting to supplant “real” Americans. For those who believe this, it is no violation of American or democratic principles to disenfranchise, marginalize and dispossess those who never should have had such rights to begin with, people you are convinced want to destroy you.

Their conviction in this illegitimacy is intimately tied to the Democratic Party’s reliance on Black votes. As Mr. Trump announced in November, “Detroit and Philadelphia — known as two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country, easily — cannot be responsible for engineering the outcome of a presidential race.” The Republican Party maintains this conviction despite Mr. Trump’s meaningful gains among voters of color in 2020.

Even as Republicans seek to engineer state and local election rules in their favor, they accuse the Democrats of attempting to rig elections by ensuring the ballot is protected. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who encouraged the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 with his claims that the 2020 election had been stolen, tells brazen falsehoods proclaiming that voting rights measures will “register millions of illegal aliens to vote” and describes them as “Jim Crow 2.0.”

But there are no Democratic proposals to disenfranchise Republicans. There are no plans to deny gun owners the ballot, to disenfranchise white men without a college education, to consolidate rural precincts to make them unreachable. This is not because Democrats or liberals are inherently less cruel. It is because parties reliant on diverse coalitions to wield power will seek to win votes rather than suppress them.

These kinds of falsehoods cannot be contested on factual grounds because they represent ideological beliefs about who is American and who is not and therefore who can legitimately wield power. The current Democratic administration is as illegitimate to much of the Republican base as the Reconstruction governments were to Morgan.

Opinion | I've Been a Critical Race Theorist for 30 Years. Our Opponents Are Just Proving Our Point For Us.

Some 25 states have already enacted or are considering laws to ban teaching what they call “critical race theory” (“CRT”) in public schools, a concept that school officials around the country deny they even teach. A parents’ group in Washoe County, Nevada wants teachers to wear body cams, just to make sure. And Ted Cruz just charged that CRT is “every bit as racist as the klansmen in white sheets.”

As a law professor closely associated with the critical race theory movement for more than 30 years, I am astonished. Most academic work never gets noticed at all, and ours is being publicly vilified, even banned. While we wrote footnotes and taught our classes, did our ideas become the new orthodoxy in American society and the foundation of K-12 education, as our critics charge?

Hardly.

CRT is not a racialist ideology that declares all whites to be privileged oppressors, and CRT is not taught in public schools.

But over the past nine months or so, first slowly in right-wing media conversation and now quickly in state houses and even mainstream newspapers, conservative activists have branded all race reform efforts in education and employment as CRT—a disinformation campaign designed to rally disaffected middle- and working-class white people against progressive change.

If you understand what CRT actually is, though, it’s easy to see that it has nothing to do with the cartoonish picture of reverse racism that its critics depict. And, more importantly, CRT is a pretty good lens for understanding why the campaign against it has been able to spread so fast.

CRT, in the real world, describes the diverse work of a small group of scholars who write about the shortcomings of conventional civil rights approaches to understanding and transforming racial power in American society. It’s a complex critique that wouldn’t fit easily into a K-12 curriculum. Even law students find the ideas challenging; we ourselves struggle to put it in understandable terms. We embrace no simple or orthodox set of principles, so no one can really be “trained” in CRT. And if teachers were able to teach such analytically difficult ideas to public school students, it should be a cause for wild celebration, not denunciation.

The common starting point of our analysis is that racial power was not eliminated by the successes of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That movement succeeded in ending the system of blatant segregation reflected in the “Whites Only” and “Colored” signs that once marked everyday life in America—but in its wake, in the 70s and the 80s, racial-justice reform in countless institutions was halted by old-guard resistance.

Seabass wrote:

So far this year, GOP lawmakers in 32 states have introduced over 80 anti-protest bills. This segment is a round-up of those bills, from the ones that could take your student loans to the ones that could make it a crime to taunt a cop. It explores the GOP’s go-to way of responding to protests: making them a crime.

Note:

96.3% of BLM protests had no property damage.
97.7% of BLM protests had no reported injuries.

felltoearth wrote:I’d appreciate a source for this as I would love to use this stat.

...data from May to June [2020], having already documented 7,305 events in thousands of towns and cities in all 50 states and D.C., involving millions of attendees

Only 3.7% of the protests involved property damage or vandalism. Some portion of these involved neither police nor protesters, but people engaging in vandalism or looting alongside the protests.

In short, our data suggest that 96.3% of events involved no property damage or police injuries, and in 97.7% of events, no injuries were reported among participants, bystanders or police.

3 Tropes of White Victimhood

Leading conservative pundits today are pounding themes that were popular among opponents of Reconstruction.

By Lawrence Glickman

About the author: Lawrence B. Glickman is a history professor at Cornell University. He is the author, most recently, of Free Enterprise: An American History.


In the conservative world, the idea that white people in the United States are under siege has become doctrine. In recent weeks, three prominent figures have each offered their own versions of this tenet.

In June, Brian Kilmeade, one of the hosts of Fox & Friends, claimed that activists were “trying to take down white culture.”

Also in June, Tucker Carlson, speaking on his nightly show with an anti-white mania graphic in the background, implied that racial strife was imminent and asked: “How do we save this country before we become Rwanda?”

The same month, Pat Robertson, a former Republican presidential candidate and the host of the Christian Broadcasting Network’s flagship show, The 700 Club, said that militants are telling “people of color … to rise up and overtake their oppressors.” He worried that, “having gotten the whip handle—if I can use the term,” people of color were now in a position “to instruct their white neighbors how to behave.” Robertson warned that if this trend continues, “America is over. It is just that simple.”

Kilmeade, Carlson, and Robertson all blamed critical race theory, a school of legal thought developed in the 1980s that has become the latest fixation of the conservative outrage machine. But the panic they expressed has a much longer history, with roots going back to white-supremacist rhetoric from before the Civil War—and particularly apparent during the attack on Reconstruction, America’s experiment in interracial democracy that lasted from 1865 until 1877.

Indeed, each of the three pundits expressed a key strand of the rhetoric of racial reaction that was pervasive among critics of Reconstruction: Carlson deployed inversion, by which white people declare reverse racism or anti-whiteness to be the crucial problem of prejudice and white people to be uniquely oppressed as a result of excessive power granted to Black Americans; Robertson deployed projection, in which white people assert that they will be treated the way they treated Black people during the Jim Crow era; and Kilmeade deployed victimization, as when a white southerner in 1875 described his region as “stripped of her honors, her glory, her pride … trampled into dust” by recently enacted laws.

These tropes of inversion, projection, and victimization overlap. During the Reconstruction era, and long afterward, white reactionaries in both the South and the North projected that the movement for racial equality was animated by what the Confederate-nostalgic newspaper The Watchman and Southron called a “hatred of the white people of the South and a determination to humiliate them as much as possible.” Using the language of inversion and victimization in 1875, the Louisville Courier-Journal—which was associated with the anti-Reconstruction Democratic Party—described Reconstruction as a “scheme of upturning society and placing the bottom on top: an effort to legislate the African into an Anglo-Saxon.”

Here it is worth pausing to state the obvious: Nothing akin to what the Mississippi politician John D. Freeman called in 1868 “negro superiority and supremacy” ever happened—or was ever even close to happening. Although many white people like Freeman maintained that Reconstruction would inevitably culminate with their being “enslaved and crushed out of civil and political existence,” the goal of Reconstruction was not oppression. It was racial equality.

John Oliver breaks down the long history of housing discrimination in the U.S., the damage it’s done, and, crucially, what we can do about it.

[Heather] McGhee discusses her powerful book, The Sum of Us, about how white people have been told that anything that benefits people of color hurts them - i.e. a zero-sum game. It ain't true!