“That Conversation about Race” category archive
The Reality Show Presidency 0
Phillip Lopate argues that the election postmortems are missing the point. It’s not anger that was the primary motivation of Trump voters; it was the desire for entertainment and excitement. They became a willing audience to his reality show. He also makes some interesting points about what makes a phony scamdal a successful political scandal.
Here’s just a tiny little bit of his article.
And there is also the excitement of hating.
My own take is this: In the phrase, “white working class” of which the punditocracy has become so fond, “working class” is not the operative. The operative word is “white.”
Aside:
I have no patience with the nattering about whether more visits to this state or that state, different nuance on platform statements, and the like might have changed the results. This election was not a strategic failure on the part of a candidate or a campaign.
It was a moral failure on the part of the voters and, perhaps especially, of the non-voters.
“It’s Not Me. It’s You.” 0
Gerald Haslam considers how racists convince themselves they are not racist. A snippet:
Still Rising Again after All These Years, Core Values Dept. 2
Over at Delaware Liberal, Evey shreds to pretense of the “Alt-Right” to be anything other than what they are: the latest attempt of the Secesh to repackage themselves. A snippet (emphasis in the original):
That sentence is nothing more than a thinly, thinly veiled* attempt to sanitize racism.
Read the whole thing.
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*I would argue that it’s not “thinly veiled,” merely paraphrased.
It’s about the Privilege 0
Leonard Pitts, Jr., does not mince words about the core of Donald Trump’s victory. He recognizes that it’s not what the corporate media are saying it is. A snippet:
It isn’t the economy. It isn’t poverty or trade. It is the coming America in which white people no longer bear the stamp of demographic primacy, in which they will be reduced from lead actor to ensemble member.
Read the rest.
You’ve Heard of White Flight? Learn about White Fright. 0
Think of the television shows you see. How often are black and brown persons depicted as gangsters, tattooed gang members, terrorists, druggies, and convicts? How seldom are they normal working folks trying to get along?
Growing up as a Southern Boy, I knew many black folks–not well, mind you, but at least I knew them–who worked hard and lived clean.
When my mother went to the hospital to give birth to my brother, a black lady came to look after me. When my father needed a new septic tank dug, a black man helped him dig it. My first playmate was a little black boy who lived on a corner of the farm.
I was too young to know prejudice and so was he. Then we got old enough to go to segregated schools, and we both learned it.
Had I grown up in some all-white wasteland, the one Badtux alludes to, I wouldn’t know better and might believe what I see on my television. I know better, but many don’t.
I once read an interview with a black actor, I can’t remember who I wish I could, who said that, when a black or brown man comes to Hollywood, he quickly realizes that his first roles will be as thugs and gangsters. Mark you, this isn’t an indictment of television and movies. Hollywood is a mirror.
A deeply racist society is the cause. This doesn’t mean that every white American is overtly racist, though many are, as the news shows more and more. It does mean that racism is baked into the system from education to housing to law enforcement to name an institution.
If you cannot accept that the United States of America is a deeply racist society, for all the “diversity” you might see in commercials, you do not accept reality and will never understand Trumpery or today’s Republican Party.
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
A century and a half later, the Confederate States of America wins another battle in the Civil War.
Reflection on the Election (Updated) 0
Hate sells.
Also, too, Chauncey Devega called it weeks ago.
Addendum:
What is likely to be ignored in the general discourse is that, in the United States of America, a nation founded on chattel slavery and stained by its original sin of racism, everything is ultimately about race. A snippet from Danielle Belton:
It took two generations, but now we shall know what a George Wallace presidency might have been like.
Listen Up, Y’Hear 0
Learn about Forsyth County, Georgia, the county that chased all them darkies off into them thar hills.
