“That Conversation about Race” category archive

In an article about the mean for the sake of mean that the Trump maladministration is displaying toward immigrants, persons who look like immigrants, and even natural-born American citizens who happen to be brown, Gustavo Arellano hears a rhyme:

Under Noem’s leadership, DHS’ social media campaign has instead produced videos that call undocumented immigrants “the worst of the worst” and depict immigration agents as heroes called by God to confront invading hordes. A recent one even used the theme song to the cartoon version of the Pokémon trading card game – tagline “Gotta catch them all” – to imply going after the mango guy and tamale lady is no different than capturing fictional monsters.

That’s one step away from “The Eternal Jew,” the infamous Nazi propaganda movie that compared Jews to rats and argued they needed to be eradicated.

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*Mark Twain.

Sam and the crew discuss the tactics of the occupiers. (Warning: There’s language in some of the video clips that they show.)

Afterthought:

Late in his life, my father said to me, “I’m glad those days are over.”

He was referring to the days of racism and segregation during which he and later I as Southern boys were raised.

But they’re not over. They may have been in abeyance for a while, but they are most certainly back with crosses burning.

America’s original sin of chattel slavery and the racist mythology created to rationalize it continue to exact their toll.

It seems that the Trump maladministration is committed to exercising undue process of lawless.

And we are again reminded that mean for the sake of mean is a Republican family value.

(Syntax error fixed.)

At the Detroit Free-Press, Randy Essex reminds us that

Since colonial times, America’s white ruling class has worked to instill fear of “others.” The landed elite recognized early on that if poor whites found common cause with native and Black people, free and enslaved, those landed elites were in trouble.

He goes on to argue that this, well, let’s call it “Southern Strategy,” is still being pursued and that Donald Trump’s bogus claims that cities are rife with crime (which is Trumpian code for “full of black and brown persons”) is an updated tactic of said “Southern Strategy.”

I commend his article to your attention.

When you don’t want to face factual reality, you can always remove any signs of the truth.

Honest to Betsy, you can’t make this stuff up.

Sam and the crew find themselves–er–somewhat taken aback by the brutality of Donald Trump’s secret police ICE agents.

At SFGate, Paula Mejía writes of Angie ‘the ICE Chaser’ Vargas, a health care professional who has made an avocation of documenting the antics of Donald Trump’s secret police ICE agents in the Los Angeles area on her TikTok account.

In the course of the interview, she gets to the crux of what’s going on (emphasis added).

“I don’t think that it’s fair how [people are] getting preyed on. Honestly, let’s just say it for what it is: It’s racism, and they’re stereotyping us for being brown,” she says. “They don’t go up to white people and ask them for their documentation. You don’t see them in Seal Beach. You don’t see them in Newport Beach. You don’t see them in Laguna. They’re preying on our urban communities.”

Rick Strom discusses ICE’s detention of legal workers at a Hyundai plant in Georgia. (Warning: The first couple of minutes are a chilling vision of what this nation is becoming under the Trump maladministration.)

From the Youtube page (emphasis added):

By her own admission, MAGA supporter and Congressional candidate Tori Branum was supposedly responsible for calling ICE on the Hyundai plant in Georgia that saw hundreds of workers, including South Korean nationals there for business purposes, rounded up and held in ICE custody, effectively costing the country billions of dollars in investments in the process.

I know this you don’t want to hear,
But realize, please, it can happen here.
Indeed, some would even say
It’s already well under way.

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*Mark Twain.