“That Conversation about Race” category archive
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
Aside:
Many years ago, during the height of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, the highest officials from my then-segregated school district drove to New Orleans for some sort of conference. My father later told me that one of them–who went on to serve competently and honorably as the county Superintendent of Schools for many years–told him this anecdote:
In Mississippi, the atmosphere was so hostile that the travelers–all white Southerners, remember–started to fake their accents to sound even more Southern than they already did.
Still Rising Again after All These Years, Reprise 0
Gary Franks, who served in the House of Representatives during the Clinton Presidency, was the first black Republican elected to the House in New England in five decades. Now, two decades later, he reminds us the KKK may no longer hide in hoods, but that it still does exist. Here’s a bit from his article:
Follow the link for the rest.
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
The editorial board of the Las Vegas Sun parses Florida Man’s playbook; they conclude he is implementing a three-pronged strategy to bring back Jim Crow, Here are the prongs:
- The first is you must separate groups of people as much as possible.
- Importantly, an essential piece of isolating people from on another is not allowing the history and reality of other people to be discussed.
- The third essential element needed to create a society that will tolerate racism is to deny the oppressed group equal access to that core of democracy: the ballot box.
Follow the link for their reasoning.
(Not that there’s any kind of pattern that one might discern in recent events.
Base Desires 0
Thom and Dean Obeidallah discuss why Republicans don’t like Representative Ilhan Omar and what it says about the Republican Party.
Calling Out the Craven 0
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has had it with Republicans’ racism, bigotry, and hypocrisy.
Not that they care.
As I have mentioned before, Richard Nixon’s racist “Southern Strategy” has come full circle and consumed the Republican Party. The Republican Party is now the party of the New Secesh.
Video via C&L, which has commentary.
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
The editorial board of the Las Vegas Sun weighs in on the antics of the Republican-led House of Representatives incongruously assembled.
The prognosis is not encouraging.
All That Was Old Is New Again 0
At NJ.com, Keith E. Benson points out that the right-wing’s ginned up outrage over critical race theory (which, again, is a graduate-level subject not taught in primary and secondary schools) is part of a long pattern. Here’s a tiny bit of his article:
Under cover of opposing CRT, the right and the racists they wish to rally have gone farther. As noted elsewhere in these electrons, they are using CRT as a smokescreen to whitewash (a most appropriate term) America’s history of slavery and discrimination against and exploitation of black persons and other minorities. They want to go back to teaching the same sort of sanitized history that I was taught in the olden days, when I was a young ‘un, in Virginia’s segregated school system.
If You Don’t Talk about It, It Didn’t Happen 0
Shevrin Jones decodes Florida Man’s code. A bit of the translation (emphasis added):
I commend the entire article to your attention.
Immunity Impunity
0
I suspect that I am not alone in avoiding watching the video of five Memphis, Tennessee, police officers murdering Tyre Nichols. I can be aware of it without subjecting myself to experiencing it in a (quasi-)first-hand manner.
Commenters routinely point out that both the victim and the perpetrators were black. Some would use this to argue that racism was not a factor, as if to pretend that America’s history of institutionalized and societal racism somehow does not insidiously affect everyone in some way or another.
At Psychology Today Blogs, Kevin Cokley considers this event and its implications. Here’s a short excerpt (emphasis added); the entire piece is worth you while.
(Broken link fixed.)
Rubbing away at Freedom 0
AL.com’s Francis Coleman suggests that some persons have a–er–misguided notion of the meaning of “freedom.” Here’s a bit from his article:
If you want to be free to do practically anything you want to, you have to extend the same to everyone else.
And there’s the rub.
Follow the link, where he expands on said rub.
Limitations of Statues 0
It’s been a long time since I visited Richmond, Va.
When I was a young ‘un, back in the olden days, though, the whole family would sometimes accompany my father when he had to go there on business, where we would stay at a hotel that is no longer a hotel. I have fond memories of agonizing over which two 35-cent Pocketbooks to buy with the dollar my mother had given me at a department stores which no longer exists and of lunching at a Hot Shoppes cafeteria, along with recollections of the imposing statues of Confederate leaders along Monument Avenue.
Those statues were part and promotion of the myth of the “Lost Cause,” that attempt to paint those persons and the movement they led as something other than what it was, that is, a treasonous rebellion to preserve chattel slavery. (As I have mentioned before, it may have been one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in history.)
Those statues are now gone, all removed within the past two years.
At SLANTblog, F. T. Rea, a native Richmonder, reflects on their removal and the suddenness thereof.
His article is worth the few minutes it will take to read.
The Unnecessary Question 0
Michael Paul Williams has some thoughts about the motives for the muting:
“It’s not just anti-Blackness. It is an explicit act of legislating white ignorance … because they are being robbed of their history as well,” she said of white students.
She recalled the 2020 movement for Black lives after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer . . .
“There were too many white young people out there marching with Black people hand in hand,” Guy said. “That is the biggest concern that they have … white people being educated.”
Image via Job’s Anger.