
…hypocrisy comes in many varieties…but this one might be too much for me
On Sunday night the Republican minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, said: “Maxine Waters is inciting violence in Minneapolis – just as she has incited it in the past. If Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi doesn’t act against this dangerous rhetoric, I will bring action this week.”
…& how exactly did she do that, you might wonder?
The California congresswoman spoke before final arguments on Monday in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis officer who knelt on the neck of George Floyd for more than nine minutes last May, resulting in the Black man’s death and global protests.
“I’m going to fight with all of the people who stand for justice,” said Waters, who is Black. “We’ve got to get justice in this country and we cannot allow these killings to continue.”
Waters said: “We’ve got to stay on the street and we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”
Of Chauvin, Waters said: “I hope we’re going to get a verdict that will say guilty, guilty, guilty. And if we don’t, we cannot go away.”
…& I’ll grant you, she did use the word “confrontational”…& she did say she’d “fight with all of the people who stand for justice”…but for the love of all that is holy…the lady was talking about efforts to curtail the unjust killing of people…time & time again…by the very people supposedly charged with upholding the law…in the context of a tradition of protest that is largely associated with the apparently outrageous concept of “civil rights”…to so much as attempt to draw an equivalence between that & a washed up multiply bankrupt morally insolvent loser inciting a mob to storm the capitol in an attempt to subvert democracy is an exercise so specious you’d need to be some kind of parasitically performative outrage infused flogger of dead horses even to try
From the far right of McCarthy’s party, the Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene compared Waters’ words with those of Trump, when he told supporters to march on Congress and overturn his election defeat, resulting in the deadly Capitol riot of 6 January.
“Speaker Pelosi,” she tweeted. “You impeached President Trump after you said he incited violence by saying ‘march peacefully’ to the Capitol. So I can expect a yes vote from you on my resolution to expel Maxine Waters for inciting violence, riots, and abusing power threatening a jury, right?”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/19/maxine-waters-minneapolis-remarks-kevin-mccarthy-marjorie-taylor-greene
…so…if I don’t get to the end of this before it’s due up…or anywhere near the teetering stack of links I was vaguely intending to overload this post with…there’s a decent chance it’ll be because my head actually exploded
John Oliver began Sunday’s Last Week Tonight by acknowledging the horrific timelessness of another monologue about police shootings in the US, after a week in which police killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, and 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago, both unarmed.
“I can safely say this week has been a fucking nightmare,” said Oliver on Sunday evening, “from the news that [Wright] was pulled over for minor traffic violations, including having an air freshener hanging on his rearview mirror, to the 26-year veteran of the police force who killed him claiming it was somehow an accident, to the local police department flying a ‘thin blue line’ flag after the shooting, which is just corn-fed, deep-fried bullshit.”
The killing of Wright, just 10 miles from the courthouse where officer Derek Chauvin is on trial for the murder of George Floyd, launched what Oliver called a “depressingly familiar cycle” in which the president “insisted on ‘peaceful protest’, which is so often just another way to prioritize compliance over righteous dissent and to protect property over human lives”.
Oliver outlined his routine response to such tragedies – list statistics on racist policing, dunk on “appalling” responses from conservative figures, reiterate the moral wrongness of the entire situation. But he rejected the repetition this time, because “the fact is, we couldn’t even finish writing about what happened to Daunte Wright before the city of Chicago released video of one of their officers killing a 13-year-old unarmed child, Adam Toledo – footage which clearly contradicted the picture of an armed confrontation painted by the police and the mayor.”
Over the course of seven years on air, Last Week Tonight has done stories on police militarization, their overuse of municipal violations and raids, their lack of accountability, and how the history of American policing is intertwined with white supremacy. “I could make the same arguments to you again now,” Oliver said. “I could describe the problem to you, but I think you know what and who it is. I could offer solutions, but I think you know what they are. I could offer you anger, but if you’re a sentient human being alive right now and you are not already full of that, I honestly don’t know what to say to you.
“Because the fact is, Black people continue to be mowed down by the police that they pay for,” he concluded.
“It’s once again been made painfully clear that we – and when I say we, I mean white America – have to stop talking about fundamental change in policing and actually make it happen,” he later added, “because this cycle of state violence against Black lives has to be stopped. So put on your shoes, leave the house, march in the streets, and demand a better country – one in which Black people are treated with fundamental respect.”
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/apr/19/john-oliver-police-killings-white-americans
…but it wasn’t john oliver that got cited as a reason chauvin’s defense might have a shot on appeal
Following closing arguments on Monday, both Derek Chauvin’s lawyer and Judge Peter A. Cahill suggested that a Democratic congresswoman’s comments about racial justice protesters, suggesting they should “get more confrontational” if the jury doesn’t return a guilty verdict, could affect the outcome of the former officer’s trial.
Eric J. Nelson, Mr. Chauvin’s lawyer, argued that Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, had interfered with “the sanctity of the jury process” when she told reporters in Brooklyn Center, Minn., on Saturday night that demonstrators would need to “stay on the street” and “get more active” if Mr. Chauvin was acquitted.
“An elected official, a United States congressperson, was making what I interpreted to be — what I think are reasonably interpreted to be — threats against the sanctity of the jury process,” Mr. Nelson said, calling for a mistrial because of Ms. Waters’s remarks.
Judge Cahill dismissed his motion but said that Ms. Waters may have inadvertently handed the defense a gift. “I’ll give you that Congresswoman Waters may have given you something on appeal that may result in this whole trial being overturned,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/us/maxine-waters-comments.html
WASHINGTON — The judge in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial in the death of George Floyd criticized recent comments by Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., saying her words could be grounds for the defense to appeal a verdict.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/confrontational-maxine-waters-undeterred-marjorie-taylor-greene-criticism-chauvin-trial
[…]
Chauvin’s attorney asked the judge to declare a mistrial over Waters’ comments, arguing that she had prejudiced the jury. Judge Peter Cahill denied the request but said that Waters’ comments were “abhorrent” and that she may have handed the defense a lifeline anyway.
[…]
“Rep. Waters is a danger to our society,” Greene, who was accused of helping encourage the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol, said in a statement.
…a danger to “our” society…is it still a dog-whistle if you’re using a bullhorn?
If anyone wondered what American fascism might look like then they could start with the proposed congressional “America First Caucus”, which emerged this weekend from the office of extremist Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene. Carrying the torch for Trumpism, this fringe agenda conceals its racial argument behind muscular populist ones. The caucus plans were welcomed by legislators who had fanned the flames of the Capitol riot. Before being elected to Congress, Ms Greene peddled conspiracy theories, made racist statements and indicated support for the execution of Democratic leaders and FBI agents. She renounced those beliefs on the eve of being kicked off congressional committees but made no apology for having held them.
The proposed caucus platform contained not so much dog whistles as foghorns for white supremacy. America, the document claims, is based on “respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and decries “post-1965 immigrants” for depressing workers’ wages, highlighting the year when the US ended its policy of giving preferential treatment to western European migrants. It calls for rebuilding the US with an “aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture”. Thankfully the plan exploded on the launch pad. Republican leaders calculated it would hurt their electoral chances in moderate swing seats. Ms Greene disowned the caucus proposals.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/19/the-guardian-view-on-an-america-first-caucus-a-warning-democracy-is-under-siege
On Saturday, Greene (R-Ga.) described the document as “a staff level draft proposal from an outside group” and claimed she had not read it. She blasted the media for “taking something out of context,” but did not specify to which policies in the document she objected.
However, Greene did not deny plans to start an “America First Caucus” and ended a lengthy Twitter thread by saying she supported former president Donald Trump’s “America First agenda.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/16/trump-loyalists-start-america-first-caucus-promote-us-uniquely-anglo-saxon/
…out of context…out of fucking context…I don’t want to offend any people of faith out there who might be good enough to take the time to cast an eye over this but the fact that woman hasn’t been struck by a fucking thunderbolt is the sort of thing that makes me doubt the existence of an omnipotent deity…because that is some fucking biblical-grade hypocrisy on display…& I know I ought to be inured to it by now…but
…& it’s not like it’s just her & judge “cite maxine on appeal” there who have me rolling my eyes so hard I’m liable to fall on my ass
“We know this trial has been painful for many people,” Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of content policy, wrote in a blog post. “We want to strike the right balance between allowing people to speak about the trial and what the verdict means, while still doing our part to protect everyone’s safety.”
Facebook, preparing for Chauvin verdict, to limit posts that might incite violence. [NYT]
[…]
But critics said Facebook and other social media platforms did not do enough. After the storming of the Capitol, the social network stopped Mr. Trump from being able to post on the site. The company’s independent oversight board is now debating whether the former president will be allowed back on Facebook and has said it plans to issue its decision “in the coming weeks,” without giving a definite date.
[…]
Facebook said on Monday that it had determined that Minneapolis was, at least temporarily, “a high-risk location.” It said it would remove pages, groups, events and Instagram accounts that violated its violence and incitement policy; take down attacks against Mr. Chauvin and Mr. Floyd; and label misinformation and graphic content as sensitive.
…& I’m just sure they’ll be even-handed about that…because technology behemoths are well known for their scrupulous moral stance and not bending over backwards to accommodate the hateful rhetoric of the indefensible…right?
Apple will allow right-leaning social media app Parler back on its App Store provided the company makes changes to its moderation policies, the iPhone maker said after booting the app, which harbored content that glorified and encouraged the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
More than three months after the removal, Apple confirmed on Monday it would reinstate Parler in a letter sent to Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.). Apple told Parler last week that the proposed new version of its app with more stringent moderation policies would be approved when it relaunches.
[…]
“We have worked to put in place systems that will better detect unlawful speech and allow users to filter content undesirable to them, while maintaining our strict prohibition against content moderation based on viewpoint,” Parler interim CEO Mark Meckler said in a statement.Getting back on the App Store is key if Parler is going to reseize its popularity. The site reportedly had 15 million users before it was knocked offline in January. In the United States, where Parler’s target audience resides, Apple is extremely important for the growth of any mobile app developer.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/19/parler-apple-app-store-reinstate/
[…]
Majority investor and Republican megadonor Rebekah Mercer increasingly pulls the strings at the company, according to people familiar with the situation. She appointed an ally, Meckler, as interim CEO after Matze was ousted.
[…]
Meckler said in an interview with Fox News in February that the company wasn’t interested in getting back on Google’s Play Store. Apps can be loaded on Android devices from the Web, unlike on Apple devices, where circumventing the App Store is nearly impossible.
…now you might say I’m over-reacting
…& consider this
The plywood boards that have for months covered glass windows and doors in downtown Washington have begun to fall away. Window displays and happy hour specials outnumber the wooden shields and painted placards for the first time since racial justice protests began nearly a year ago, following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Tall, no-scale fencing that for the better part of a year encircled the pastel yellow walls of St. John’s Church has been replaced by waist-high aluminum barriers.
But behind this easing exterior, the District has amped up its police presence, placing officers on 12-hour shifts and asking for aid from the National Guard in anticipation of more protests to come.
After Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) made a direct appeal Monday to acting secretary of the Army John E. Whitley, he authorized the activation of about 250 unarmed troops to help respond to any protests that may arise following a verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer accused in Floyd’s death.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-chauvin-national-guard/2021/04/19/story.html
[…]
The Virginia State Police, emergency management officials and the Capitol Police in Richmond had a conference call Monday with Richmond police to discuss how they would respond to potential unrest after the verdict, according to a person familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. Richmond saw weeks of protests after Floyd’s death last year.
[…]
In early January, as the District braced for a violent show of force by groups disputing President Biden’s election victory, a modest National Guard presence was requested to help with traffic and crowd control. The Army initially pushed to reject the D.C. government’s request, according to an internal memo obtained by The Post
[…]
“The chief of police and the director of D.C. homeland security have been coordinating and preparing for several weeks, probably since before the trial even began,” Bowser said.
[…]
Police arrested four people on Saturday, all of whom were accused of assault on a police officer and possession of a destructive device. D.C. police said the devices included Roman candles, bottle rockets and other fireworks. One person who was arrested, a 15-year-old boy from Alexandria, was also accused of carrying an ax. Police also said protesters threw water bottles at officers during the confrontation.
…now, I’m not advocating packing a hatchet to go protest or anything…but exactly where the fuck was this kind of preemptive consideration back in january when even someone like me could have told you that there was a guarantee of the crowd the most-impeached-president had been whipping up into a frenzy for months included people with premeditated plans for violence…conspicuous by its fucking absence is where…as well the world knows at this point
A federal judge on Monday jailed two Proud Boys leaders pending trial in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, handing a victory to U.S. prosecutors in a closely watched conspiracy case accusing the pair of planning to disrupt Congress and leading as many as 60 others to impede police that day.
U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly of Washington acknowledged that online organizers Ethan Nordean, 30, of Seattle and Joseph Randall Biggs, 37, of Ormond Beach, Fla., “lacked most of the usual markers of dangerousness” relied on by judges to detain other Jan. 6 defendants, saying that neither was armed, assaulted police or had a criminal record.
However, Kelly ruled, “these defendants are alleged by their leadership and planning to have facilitated political violence on January 6th, even if they themselves did not carry a weapon or strike a blow.”
Calling the factual allegations “gravely serious,” Kelly said in an unusual two-hour-long reading of his decision from the bench that both defendants are charged with “seeking to steal one of the crown jewels in our country . . . by interfering with the peaceful transfer of power.” Kelly added that nothing short of jail could assure that they did not mobilize others to violate the law or threaten public safety.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/proud-boys-detained-capitol-riot/2021/04/19/story.html
…now maybe it’s just me…but if you were to replace the names of those two assholes with…oh…guliani…or the bigly loser himself…or…you get the point, I’m sure…&…well…”nothing short of jail could assure that they did not mobilize others to violate the law or threaten public safety“
American democracy faces many challenges: New limits on voting rights. The corrosive effect of misinformation. The rise of domestic terrorism. Foreign interference in elections. Efforts to subvert the peaceful transition of power. And making matters worse on all of these issues is a fundamental truth: The two political parties see the other as an enemy.
It’s an outlook that makes compromise impossible and encourages elected officials to violate norms in pursuit of an agenda or an electoral victory. It turns debates over changing voting laws into existential showdowns. And it undermines the willingness of the loser to accept defeat — an essential requirement of a democracy.
This threat to democracy has a name: sectarianism. It’s not a term usually used in discussions about American politics. It’s better known in the context of religious sectarianism — like the hostility between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq. Yet a growing number of eminent political scientists contend that political sectarianism is on the rise in America.
That contention helps make sense of a lot of what’s been going on in American politics in recent years, including Donald J. Trump’s successful presidential bid, President Biden’s tortured effort to reconcile his inaugural call for “unity” with his partisan legislative agenda, and the plan by far-right House members to create a congressional group that would push some views associated with white supremacy. Most of all, it re-centers the threat to American democracy on the dangers of a hostile and divided citizenry.
Why Political Sectarianism Is a Growing Threat to American Democracy [NYT]
…& I think what’s most galling about this might just be that it’s bullshit predicated on bullshit in an attempt to preserve bullshit
In 2008, a satirical blog called Stuff White People Like became a brief but boisterous sensation. The conceit was straightforward, coupling a list, eventually 136 items long, of stuff that white people liked to do or own, with faux-ethnographic descriptions that explained each item’s purported racial appeal. […] It was an instant hit. In its first two months alone, Stuff White People Like drew 4 million visitors, and it wasn’t long before a book based on the blog became a New York Times bestseller.
[…]
Looking back at Stuff White People Like today, what marks the site’s age is neither the particularities of its irony nor the broad generalities of its targets. There are still plenty of white people with too much time and too much disposable income on their hands, and plenty of them still like yoga (#15), Vespa scooters (#126), and “black music that black people don’t listen to any more” (#116).What has changed, however – changed in ways that date Stuff White People Like unmistakably – is the cultural backdrop. Ten years ago, whiteness suffused mainstream culture like a fog: though pervasive to the point of omnipresence, it was almost nowhere distinct. When the sorts of white people for and about whom Lander was writing talked about being white, their conversations tended to span the narrow range between defensiveness and awkwardness. If they weren’t exactly clamouring to dispense with their racial identity, and the privileges that came with it, they were also not eager to embrace, or even discuss it, in public.
In the years since, especially among the sort of people who might have once counted themselves fans of Lander’s blog, the public significance of whiteness has undergone an almost wholesale re-evaluation. Far from being a punchline for an anxious, cathartic joke, whiteness is now earnestly invoked, like neoliberalism or populism, as a central driver of cultural and political affairs. Whereas Lander could score a bestseller in 2008 with a book mocking whiteness as a bland cultural melange whose greatest sin was to be uninteresting, just nine years later Ta-Nehisi Coates would have his own bestseller that described whiteness as “an existential danger to the country and the world”.
Much of the change, of course, had to do with Donald Trump, for whom, as Coates put it, “whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic, but is the very core of his power”. But it was not only Trump. Whiteness has been implicated in events on both sides of the Atlantic, including Brexit; mass shootings in Norway, New Zealand and the US; the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings; and the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol. Alongside these real-world incidents, a bumper crop of scholarship, journalism, art and literature – by Coates, Nell Irvin Painter, Jordan Peele, Eric Foner, Ava DuVernay, Adam Serwer, Barbara and Karen Fields, Kevin Young, David Olusoga, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Colson Whitehead and Claudia Rankine, among many others – has spurred the most significant reconsideration of racial whiteness in 50 years.
[…]
What these recent debates have demonstrated more than anything, perhaps, is how little agreement still exists about what whiteness is and what it ought to be. Nearly everywhere in contemporary society “white” is presumed to be a meaningful index of identity that, like age and gender, is important enough to get mentioned in news accounts, tallied in political polls, and recorded in government databases. Yet what that identity is supposed to tell us is still substantially in dispute. In many ways, whiteness resembles time as seen by Saint Augustine: we presume we understand it as long as we’re not asked to explain it, but it becomes inexplicable as soon as we’re put to the test.A little more than a century ago, in his essay The Souls of White Folk, the sociologist and social critic WEB Du Bois proposed what still ranks as one of the most penetrating and durable insights about the racial identity we call white: “The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing – a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.”
[…]
If it’s easy enough for many people today to accept that whiteness is a purely sociological phenomenon – in some quarters, the idea that “race is a social construct” has become a cliche – the same cannot be said for Du Bois’s suggestion that whiteness is a relatively new thing in human history. And yet just as in the case of genetic science, during the second half of the 20th century a number of historians demonstrated that while Du Bois was off by a few hundred years, he was correct that it was only in the modern period that people started to think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race.
[…]
The economic utility of the idea of whiteness helped spread it rapidly around the world. Du Bois was not wrong to call it a religion, for like a religion, it operated at every psychological, sociological and political scale, from the most intimate to the most public. Like a religion, too, it adapted to local conditions. What it meant to be white in British Virginia was not identical to what it would mean in New York before the American civil war, in India during the Raj, in Georgia during Jim Crow, in Australia after Federation, or in Germany during the Third Reich. But what united all these expressions was a singular idea: that some group of people called white was naturally superior to all others. As Benjamin Disraeli, the Victorian prime minister and one of the most committed race ideologists of his time, put it, “race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance”.The idea of whiteness, in other words, was identical to the idea of white supremacy. For the three centuries that preceded the civil rights movement, this presumption was accepted at the most refined levels of culture, by people who, in other contexts, were among the most vocal advocates of human liberty and equality. It is well known that Immanuel Kant argued we should treat every other person “always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means”. Less well known is his proposal, in his Lectures on Physical Geography, published in 1802, that “humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites”, or his claim, in his notes for his Lectures on Anthropology, that native “Americans and Negroes cannot govern themselves. Thus, serve only as slaves”. Even Gandhi, during the early part of his life, accepted the basic lie of whiteness, arguing that “the English and the Indians spring from a common stock, called the Indo-Aryan” and that “the white race in South Africa should be the predominating race”.
As though aware of their own guilty conscience, the evangelists of the religion of whiteness were always desperate to prove that it was something other than mere prejudice. Where the Bible still held sway, they bent the story of Noah’s son Ham into a divine apologia for white supremacy. When anatomy and anthropology gained prestige in the 18th and 19th centuries, they cited pseudo-scientific markers of racial difference like the cephalic index and the norma verticalis. When psychology took over in the 20th, they told themselves flattering stories about divergences in IQ.
For all their evident success, the devotees of the religion of whiteness were never able to achieve the total vision they longed for. In part, this was because there were always dissenters, including among those who stood to gain from it, who rejected the creed of racial superiority. Alongside those remembered by history – Elizabeth Freeman, Toussaint Louverture, Harriet Tubman, Sitting Bull, Franz Boas, Haviva Reik, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela – there were millions of now-forgotten people who used whatever means they possessed to resist it. In part, too, the nonsense logic that regulated the boundaries of whiteness – the one-drop rule in the US, which said that anyone with Black ancestry could not be white; the endless arguments over what “caucasian” was supposed to mean; the “honorary Aryan” status that Hitler extended to the Japanese – was no match for the robust complexities of human society.
Yet if the religion of whiteness was never able to gain acceptance as an unchallengeable scientific fact, it was still hugely successful at shaping social reality. Some of this success had to do with its flexibility. Thanks to its role in facilitating slavery, whiteness in the US was often defined in opposition to blackness, but between those two extremes was room for tactical accommodations. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin could claim that only the English and Saxons “make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth”, and nearly 80 years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson would insist that the Irish, like the Chinese and the Native American, were not caucasian. Over time, however, the definition of who counted as culturally white expanded to include Catholics from southern Europe, the Irish and even Jews, who for centuries had been seen as quintessential outsiders.
The religion of whiteness also found success by persuading its adherents that they, and not the people they oppressed, were the real victims. In 1692, colonial legislators in British Barbados complained that “sundry of the Negroes and Slaves of this island, have been long preparing, contriving, conspiring and designing a most horrid, bloody, damnable and detestable rebellion, massacre, assassination and destruction”. From there, it was a more or less straight line to Woodrow Wilson’s claim, in 1903, that the southerners who started the Ku Klux Klan were “aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation”, and to Donald Trump’s warning, when he launched his presidential campaign in 2015, that Mexican immigrants to the US were “bringing drugs. And they’re bringing crime. And they’re rapists.”
Where the religion of whiteness was not able to win converts with persuasion or fear, it deployed cruder measures to secure its power, conscripting laws, institutions, customs and churches to enforce its prerogatives. Above all, it depended on force. By the middle of the 20th century, the presumption that a race of people called white were superior to all others had supplied the central justification not just for the transatlantic slave trade but also for the near-total extinction of Indians in North America; for Belgian atrocities in Congo; for the bloody colonisation of India, east Africa and Australia by Britain; for the equally bloody colonisation of north and west Africa and south-east Asia by France; for the deployment of the Final Solution in Nazi Germany; and for the apartheid state in South Africa. And those are merely the most extreme examples. Alongside those murdered, raped and enslaved in the name of whiteness, the total number of whom runs at least to nine figures, are an almost unthinkable number of people whose lives were shortened, constrained, antagonised and insulted on a daily basis.
[…]
Instead of looking too hard at the sordid history of whiteness, many white people found it easier to decide that the civil rights movement had accomplished all the anti-racism work that needed doing. The result was a strange détente. On the one hand, whiteness retreated as a subject of public attention, giving way to a new rhetoric of racial colour-blindness. On the other hand, vast embedded economic and cultural discrepancies allowed white people continue to exercise the institutional and structural power that had accumulated on their behalf across the previous three centuries.Similarly, while blatant assertions of white power – such as the 1991 gubernatorial campaign of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, in Louisiana – met with significant elite resistance, what counted as racist (and therefore subject to the taboo) was limited to only the most flagrant instances of racial animus. Among liberals and conservatives, racism was widely understood as a species of hatred, which meant that any white person who could look into his heart and find an absence of open hostility could absolve himself of racism.
[…]
By the 80s and 90s, however, at least in white-dominated media, “white supremacy” was reserved only for the most shocking and retrograde examples of racism. For many people who grew up at that time, as I did, the phrase evoked cross burnings and racist hooligans, rather than an intricate web of laws and norms that maintained disparities of wealth, education, housing, incarceration and access to political power.
[…]
Of course not everyone accepted this new dispensation, which scholars have variously described as “structural racism”, “symbolic racism” or “racism without racists”. In the decades following the civil rights movement, intellectuals and activists of colour continued to develop the Du Boisian intellectual tradition that understood whiteness as an implement of social domination. In the 80s and 90s, a group of legal scholars that included Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris and Richard Delgado produced a body of research that became known as critical race theory, which was, in Bell’s words, “ideologically committed to the struggle against racism, particularly as institutionalised in and by law”.Alongside critical race theory, and in many ways derived from it, a new academic trend, known as whiteness studies, took shape. Historians working in this subfield demonstrated the myriad ways in which the pursuit of white supremacy – like the pursuit of wealth and the subjection of women – had been one of the central forces that gave shape to Anglo-American history. For many of them, the bill of indictment against whiteness was total: as the historian David Roediger put it, “it is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false.”
[…]
By the mid-2000s, the “colour-blind” ideological system had become so successful that it managed to shield even the more obvious operations of whiteness – the overwhelming numbers of white people in corporate boardrooms, for instance, or in the media and tech industries – from much censure. In the US, when racial disparities could not be ignored, it was often suggested that time was the only reliable remedy: as the numerical proportion of whites dwindled, so too would their political and economic power diminish. (Never mind that whiteness had managed to escape predictions of demographic doom before, by integrating groups it had previously kept on its margins.)
[…]
Not for the first time, however, what was visible on Twitter was a poor indicator of deeper social trends. As we now know, the ways in which whiteness was becoming most salient at mid-decade were largely not the ways that prompted recent university graduates to announce their support for Rhodes Must Fall on Instagram. Far more momentous was the version of white identity politics that appreciated the advantages of whiteness and worried about them slipping away; that saw in immigration an existential threat; and that wanted, more than anything, to “Take Back Control” and to “Make America Great Again”.It was this version of whiteness that helped to power the twin shocks of 2016: first Brexit and then Trump. The latter, especially – not just the fact of Trump’s presidency but the tone of it, the unrestrained vengeance and vituperation that animated it – put paid to any lingering questions about whether whiteness had renounced its superiority complex. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who more than any other single person had been responsible for making the bumbling stereotype of whiteness offered up by Stuff White People Like seem hopelessly myopic, understood what was happening immediately. “Trump truly is something new – the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president,” Coates wrote in the autumn of 2017. “His ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea
…& I know that’s a lot of quoted text…although the article is longer still & well worth reading in its entirety if you have the time & your blood pressure allows for that sort of thing…the part that talks about the overlap with a particular conception of “christianity” for example overlaps with the sort of stuff mentioned in the NOT last night…but to get back to what’s making mine spike…it’s not like the likes of “empty” greene (or even mango unchained himself, for all that his brain seems mostly to have rotted down to a gollum-like residue) don’t understand this shit
…they think they’re cleverly exploiting it
…& I know there’s all kinds of stuff I could have been going on about instead
…hell, hard as it might be to believe I’d rather be going on about all kinds of other stuff
When bookstores across the United States closed last spring, Tyrrell Mahoney, the president of Chronicle Books, braced for disaster as she watched revenue plummet. Then, months into the crisis, Chronicle found an unlikely savior: the rapper Snoop Dogg and his two-year-old cookbook.
What Snoop Dogg’s Success Says About the Book Industry [NYT]
A small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history on Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the wispy air of the red planet. It was the first machine from Earth ever to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world.
NASA’s Mars Helicopter Completes First Flight on Another Planet [NYT]
Humans solve problems by adding complexity, even when it’s against our best interests [WaPo]
A driverless Tesla crashed and burned for four hours, police said, killing two passengers in Texas [WaPo]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/04/19/us-embarks-on-huge-climate-reset
…but
As the trial of Derek Chauvin, the white former police officer charged with murder in the death of Mr. Floyd, a Black man, draws to a close, the city is on edge, fearing that a not-guilty verdict would bring anger, chaos and destruction once again.
Last week, as the community was consumed by televised testimony in the trial, the Twin Cities region was rocked after Daunte Wright was shot dead by a police officer following a routine traffic stop in the suburban community of Brooklyn Center. Hundreds came out for mostly peaceful protests, although dozens of businesses were looted and vandalized near Lake Street.[…]
The testimony in the Chauvin trial is done; closing arguments are scheduled for Monday, and then the case goes to the jury. As the city awaits the verdict, which could come down as early as this week, there is a sense of life suspended — an inability to imagine what the world will look like after the jury of seven women and five men reaches its decision.
‘God Knows What’s Going to Happen’: Minneapolis Braces for Verdict in Floyd’s Death [NYT]
Derek Chauvin trial hears closing arguments as America braces for verdict [Guardian]
…& by “brace”…some places might not mean what you think
A Minnesota lawmaker introduced legislation to punish any person convicted of crimes in connection with a protest by making them ineligible for state government assistance — including food stamps, student loans, unemployment benefits and health care.
The legislation, authored by Republican state Sen. David Osmek, would affect a litany of state programs. It faces a difficult path to become law because the state House and governor’s office are controlled by Democrats.
The bills says after a conviction the person would not be eligible, “for any type of state loan, grant, or assistance, including but not limited to college student loans and grants, rent and mortgage assistance, supplemental nutrition assistance, unemployment benefits and other employment assistance, Minnesota supplemental aid programs, business grants, medical assistance, general assistance, and energy assistance.”
[…]
Republican lawmakers in more than 20 states have considered new legislation aimed at increasing penalties on protesters charged in connection with demonstrations, most in response to Black Lives Matter protests. Civil rights groups and Democrats have said the legislation would curtail First Amendment protections and adversely affect Black and Brown populations.Earlier Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed similar legislation into law. Among a number of other measures, the bill stiffens criminal penalties for crimes committed amid protests that become violent.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/minn-lawmaker-proposes-revoking-convicted-protesters-student-loans-food-stamps
…so…sorry about how all that reads…feel free to fill up the comments with links about something else entirely…or otherwise change the subject…but first…here’s a few more tunes than usual…maybe that’ll help take the edge off?
Well, here’s hoping that, even though everyone is sure of the verdict, the jury will surprise us.
It’s funny that any type of gun control is seen as an erosion of rights, first the guns then the [insert here] but an actual curtailment of the right to protest is hohum, whatevs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RijB8wnJCN0
Margarine Green is plenty fucking dumb. Naming her Kaukkus: America First brings back another stupid thing from US Amercia’s dismal past.
The Nazi sponsored America First weenies/racists who tried to keep the US out of World War 2. Among the bigger names involved were Joe Kennedy Sr and Charles Lindbergh. Turns out they were dead wrong. I’ve read the revisionist shit written by Libertarians determined to never admit failure/be on the wrong side of history and I just laugh (usually from the racist Ron Paul wing.) Mostly made up of Repubs, but had a number of isolationist Dems like Kennedy who seemed to be in it to fuck with the English and pay them back for all their crimes in Ireland and Dixiecrats, who probably thought Hitler had some fine ideas.)
You had me at “plenty fucking dumb.”
Lindbergh was a white supremacist who fucking got awarded metals from Hitler. Him supporting America First is right on brand.
Heartbreaking.
Ted “I Shit My Pants To Stay Out of the Vietnam War/CoVID is a scam” Nugent has CoVID.
Sez racist shit and behaves like Ted Nugent with CoVID.
Well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of one’s actions.
The rachael abrams nyt story about oan is pretty damning. The Dominion lawsuit aside, at what point does the FCC step in and shut that shit down?
Golingan, the oan producer quoted in the nyt article, has been fired by oan. That was fast.
I’m just guessing, but I suspect Golingan both knew it was coming and wanted it to happen. OAN may continue onward, but any serious journalist is going to want to get the hell out of there while he or she still has a career. I suspect Golingan is hoping a high-profile termination will help him to locate other employment: “Hey, I saw what was going on and spoke out against it and lost my job as a result.” Not the worst way to explain getting fired, plus it has the virtue of being publicly documented, whatever OAN’s HR department might say.
I try not to get hung up on this because absurdity is inevitably the fascist way, but barely known (outside of the Fox News Extended Universe) Congresswoman Maxine Waters has the power to sway juries and incite riots across the country but President Mango Unchained was merely an innocent bystander as neo-Nazis killed people in Charlottesville, as his followers stormed the Capitol, as hate crimes shot up against Asian Americans, as people killed their relatives by refusing to mask, as state leaders tried to figure out how to overturn democracy on his behalf, as Russia reached out to people around him to offer election aid, etc. etc.
Clearly the GOP needs to focus a lot harder on the 43rd District in California, as it appears to be the most powerful political position in the known universe.
I mean, Auntie Maxine IS THE SHIT, and folks on the left HAVE known she’s fucking awesome for years now, too…..
But YEAH the misogynoir is EXTRA-EXTRA STRONG against her, simply because she IS a reasonably powerful Black woman who KNOWS she has that power, isn’t afraid to wield it, and also suffers NO fools.
I mentioned the other night that a black man was killed in Hawaii by police and have seen no coverage on the mainland about it. Maybe because they are portraying it as justified or maybe because Hawaii is like another country? In any case, I have spoken to my nieces and friends that were very close to him and his family and they all have more questions than answers. Lindani was a kind man with two kids under two years old. The part they are not talking about is that he knew a resident of the house & was not doing anything wrong. He is speaking calmly to the first cop when the two other cops, guns drawn start yelling at him without ever identifying themselves shining a flashlight in his face in the dark. In his home of S. Africa, if someone does that you fight for your life and that is what he did. Unfortunately, he lost that fight and his family and friends lost too. Strange that the first cop had his bodycam off and only these two were on. They are also not releasing the Ring camera footage.
https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2021/04/16/live-hpd-holds-news-conference-release-body-cam-footage-fatal-officer-involved-shooting/
I think that after that admission by that Oath Keeper guy about all of the Oath keepers in police forces – that every police involved shooting of a person of color needs to be investigated as a hate crime by the FBI. I know it won’t happen but it needs to happen.
That’s totally not suspicious or concerning at all that there isn’t footage being released. Racist dickbags.
I think I’ve nailed down why you have so much trouble sleeping. Because you read too many news and opinion pieces, so you don’t have enough time to do all the other shit in your day.
Must have tabbed before I hit “return” and it posed too soon. Anyway, I strongly recommend dialing back your daily intake of anxiety-inducing reading.
…I appreciate the sentiment…but I try to keep it from actually screwing up my doing-stuff-time
…if I hadn’t got quite so carried away with this one I actually had a whole bunch of not-so-politics links I keep meaning to fill one of these with
…it’s generally not the news I read when I can’t sleep…honest, guv?
Welp. The jury has reached their verdict and will announce within the hour (~40 mins by now). My heart stopped when I read the NYT alert and I’m trying not to get too worked up over the next hour. I can only hope the quick deliberation time means they all agree Chauvin is guilty, and that there was no need for much back-and-forth, and there are no squirrely jurors leading to a hung jury.
I also sincerely hope the judge’s nonsense about Maxine Waters’s comments about a mistrial doesn’t go anywhere, because WTF.
@meh-zuzah Sorry, I didn’t see that you’d already posted this. I’m so nervous.
No problem. It needs to be out there as much as possible. I’m trying not to implode before it’s read.
GUILTY on all three counts.
I was honestly surprised when my coworker told me this, and had to go check online myself
I honestly didn’t expect a conviction, even with all the video evidence and eyewitness testimony. That’s pretty fucked up, isn’t it?
Fucked up, but real.
Listening to Judge Cahill read the Jury through the charges yesterday, as I was driving to my observation school, I definitely felt like the prosecution brought EVERYTHING they had needed for a conviction.
I’m just SO relieved the Jurors thought they did, too💖
This solves NOTHING, as far as the structural problems here in Mpls & MN in general go.
But guilty on all three WILL act as a pressure-release valve, so that folks can breathe a bit, and relax enough to get ready to make those hard pushes, to get the structural reforms done.
The Chauvin verdict is in, will be read in open court between 4:30 and 5.
They DO call it Murder!!!
Murder in the Second Degree,amd the Third Degree.
Manslaughter, too, And Bail REVOKED!
THANK GOD!!!
ROT IN HELL is trending on Twitter.
…..
I hadn’t allowed myself to expect this outcome. I’m relieved.
It’s a strange sensation, isn’t it? We’re so used to the gaslighting, it feels like even such a clear-cut, egregious case would also go all dumpster fire on us, too.
Tbh, that’s DEFINITELY been the feeling in the air here, too.
Last night, I ran across a thread over on Twitter, with a ton of Mpls folks, where the original poster said something like, “Hey MSP Twitter, how’re y’all doing? Reply by .gif”
And the VAST majority of them were on the nature of this
https://tenor.com/view/daffy-duck-looney-tunes-nervous-gif-3572003
I hope you and your community rest a little easier tonight, knowing that at the very least accountability is possible as a first step toward transformative justice.
Tbh, the vibe around Uptown was noticeably different in feel, tonight, than it has been in days.
The pressure-release valve thing i mentioned elsewhere really IS what it feels like💖
We KNOW this fixes none of it. But it *does* bring some measure of Justice (much like the settlement), for George Floyd’s family.
His murderer WILL be locked up, and not walking free.
It can never make up for the loss of George’s life.
But it’s an ok start toward us doing the right thing & making it so that other families don’t suffer the kind of loss that theirs has.
Same, Hannibal, SAME!
I was afraid it would be *maybe* the 3rf degree Murder, and the Manslaughter charge…
I am SO glad they came back that fast, AND with all 3💖💖💖
Dang, I forgot all about Stuff White People Like. Right down in the memory hole with Perez Hilton.
And legal eagles, why would Maxine Waters’ comments be considered grounds for appeal/overturning the conviction? It’s literally just one person’s opinion? Maybe sequester the jury next time, it was kind of a big deal…
I read that article yesterday and was not expecting it to lead off with Stuff White People Like. I wonder what
MorganChristian Lander is up to now? Presumably, someone handed him a TV writing gig once the blog folded. [ETA: I looked it up and, yup: TV, specifically producing for Black-ish…which…,…,…]On Maxine Waters: Firstly, I’m no legal eagle, nor legal pheasant. It’s weak, but it seems the argument would be that a non-sequestered jury may have been privy to Waters’s call to “protesters to ‘stay on the street’ and ‘get more confrontational’ if former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is acquitted in the killing of George Floyd” and, perhaps, hearing that would have influenced the jurors to convict Chauvin, fearing more rioting if they didn’t. If that were true, then perhaps in appeals efforts they would try to declare this a mistrial It’s speculative crap, but it’s not as though Chauvin’s present and future defense has anything better to rely upon, apart from perhaps claiming incompetent or negligent legal representation on their own part.