From Pine View Farm

Still Rising Again after All These Years 0

Leonard Pitts, Jr., argues that one factor contributing to yesterday’s racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, was our society’s inability to be honest about racism. A snippet:

Indeed, as the moral authority of the Civil Rights Movement recedes deeper into memory, as cable news and social media offer new platforms and broad reach to voices of acrimony and hate and as facts become “facts” become untruths become lies and too few of us seem to notice or care, the intellectual dishonesty surrounding race has become starker, more brazen and more creative than we have seen in years.

Like when people say that talking about racism is racism.

Or when they babble pious inanities like “racism goes both ways” and “all lives matter.”

Nor have news media always brought clarity. It was pundits, after all, who kept ascribing Donald Trump’s rise to “economic anxiety” even as his followers were yelling racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic slurs with unbridled glee. And leave us not forget how media have allowed the folks who brought such chaos to Charlottesville to brand themselves under a banal-sounding new euphemism — the “alt-right” — as if they were not the same bunch of mouth-breathing, lowlife racists they always were.

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