“That Conversation about Race” category archive

Der Spiegel takes a deep dive into Republican attempts to suppress dissenting views. A snippet:

America at the moment is not just enduring attacks by a completely untethered president and his administration against critics and political rivals. It is an attack on thought itself.

Follow the link for context.

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In a longer article about Donald Trump’s use of the National Guard to subjugate those who might disagree with his edicts occupy American cities, Roy S. Johnson decodes de code:

The deployment of National Guard troops in many cities has recently been massaged as protecting “federal officers and assets” against “ongoing violent riots and lawlessness.”

Translation: Trump is sending American troops to “protect” his swelling flotilla of barely-trained, masked and thuggish ICE agents who are attacking brown and Black people, including children and the elderly, even in their homes, as they did this week in Chicago.

David suggests that we are seeing

. . . authoritarian theater at its worst.

Grunge_e_Gene hears a rhyme that sounds a lot like “Blackwater.”

You remember Blackwater, do you not, the security firm mercenaries from the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq?

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*Mark Twain.

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.