White People Just Have To Take It For A While
A year ago white people were getting it. After a series of questionable actions by various local police officers, sometimes ending in the death of an unarmed black man, thousands of whites were taking to the streets in protest, joining in calls for "police reform". Just as important as the calls for reform was the simple understanding that blacks, and browns and reds and yellows have always had a point - they arent treated the same as whites are. And a year ago it appeared that quite a few white people were in agreement with that point, at least superficially.
Time tends to erode everything (one of those thermodynamics thingys) and it seems at this point to have eroded some of the commitment of whites to promote change. As usual we get the regular suspects that spend much of their time whining about "wokeness", and the now ubiquitous complaint about "critical race theory" ( a term that most of them didnt know existed a year ago) and they also grumble about the 1619 Project ( which purports to show that the "founding " era of the United States was filled with racism.) Nothing the 1619 Project says is in general wrong, but the critics have jumped on a few statements or passages from essays written by those associated with the 1619 Project and declared that the whole thing is "radical" and unAmerican.
So we have gotten over the urgency that was felt last summer, the urgency to fix something about the way racial minorities are treated and perhaps more importantly, thought about, in America in the 2020's. The white middle class we are told are "tired" of hearing about racism. They want to shout that Thomas Jefferson was a great man and for god's sake get off his back. I doubt if 1 out of 10 of such people have any familiarity at all with what Thomas Jefferson said or did, but god darn it, they are fed up with "unAmericans".
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A white person who is in their 50's today (basic middle age) would have been born right around the time it finally became illegal to racially discriminate against people of color. Until that point the US was literally a white supremacist country. We were beginning to have a "dream" via the words of Martin Luther King Jr. , but open racism was still widespread and passed from generation to generation. So imagine a 40 year old white man in 1965. He is one of those guys who goes down to the corner bar with his buddies and occasionally (often) talks about the "ni-gers" that are moving into apartments and houses in the next neighborhood over. Those people want to ruin everything. Maybe the guy in the bar even joins a group that goes and throws rocks through the window of a house just bought by the n- words in a white neighborhood nearby. When he goes home he talks about it with his wife, and the kids hear him.
Not too many years later those little kids are growing up, and eventually they are in middle age today, with kids or grandkids of their own. This is the passage of one generation. A white racist who came from a time when white supremacy was the law of the land is the father of someone in their 50's or 60's today or the grandfather of someone in their 30's. In terms of the passage of time, these spans are not even a blip.
And yet we are told no one needs to be "woke".
White people are going to have to "suffer" for a while longer.
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Florida’s Ron DeSantis Wants to Cancel Education About Systemic Racism
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is running for president in 2024.
Or, if his mentor and ally Donald Trump claims the Republican nomination, DeSantis will gladly jump on board as Mike Pence’s replacement on the ticket that is prepared to wage a culture war more visceral than anything the United States has ever seen.
When it comes to exploiting racist and xenophobic dog whistles—and policies—no Republican on the national stage is more determined than the governor of Trump’s adopted home state to attack anyone who is willing to address the ugly truth of systemic racism. Indeed, DeSantis is signaling that he is even prepared to purge what was once described as “the Party of Lincoln” of elected officials who dare to suggest that the abolitionist cause and the fight against Jim Crow segregation—in which Republicans were pivotal players—was a necessary response to persistent white supremacy.
DeSantis is moving this week to position himself as the loudest champion of the latest conservative crusade: an effort to bar public schools from providing students with a full and honest history of the United States. For months, Republicans around the country have been seeking to prevent schools from teaching lessons based on critical race theory . Now, DeSantis says he is moving to “the forefront” of this fight.
The governor is spewing a slurry of false premises in order to attack the idea that systemic racism has informed the laws of a country that began by permitting human bondage, then imposed violent segregation, and now continues to witness brutal inequality.
Even the most cursory consideration of American history confirms the importance of teaching that, in the words of scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, seeks to “[grapple] with a history of white supremacy [and] that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it.” Yet DeSantis dismisses education that is informed by critical race theory, attacking schooling that focuses on systemic racism and white supremacy as “teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.”
This is a political gambit on the part of a governor who dismisses talk about addressing systemic racism as “ a bunch of horse manure .” But it is likely to have immediate policy repercussions.
“We are going to get the Florida political apparatus involved so we can make sure there’s not a single school board member who supports critical race theory,” DeSantis announced in a Fox News appearance Saturday. To that end, the governor is pushing the State Board of Education to adopt a narrow set of guidelines on how US history lessons can be taught in the nation’s third most populous state. In particular, he wants the state board to declare that teachers “may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”
DeSantis says his allies on the board will move to bar teachers from discussing their personal opinions and insights regarding racism as part of a strategy aimed at “banning any departure from accurate history and following our standards.”
To enforce his indoctrination agenda, the increasingly authoritarian governor has signaled that he will get involved in local school board races and punish Republicans who do not follow his line. “We’re not going to support any Republican candidate for school board who supports critical race theory in all 67 counties or supports mandatory masking of school children,” DeSantis told Fox.
People who aren’t from Florida will be forgiven for assuming, based on DeSantis’s ranting and raving, that critical race theory is being taught in schools across the state. But that’s not the case. “The theory is not taught in any Florida school districts, state officials acknowledge,” the Miami Herald reported Monday. Still, adds the newspaper, “DeSantis is repeatedly injecting it into discussions about how teachers should deliver lessons on civics and history to more than 2 million public school students in Florida.”
So, though the issue is not really an issue in Florida, DeSantis declares, “This is something we’ve got to stay on the forefront of.”
Why? DeSantis won’t say it in so many words, but it’s no secret that he is running for president —or, if Trump tells him differently, for vice president. Trump’s in on this speculation. Asked on Monday if he would consider DeSantis as a 2024 running mate, the defeated former president replied, “Sure I would.… I would certainly consider Ron.” Trump even claimed credit for DeSantis’s rapid rise to political prominence. “I was at the beginning of Ron,” Trump said . “I was the first one to endorse him when he came out as a congressman that a lot of people didn’t know and my endorsement helped him tremendously and I know him very well. He’s a great guy.”
Trump’s enthusiasm for DeSantis is understandable. They share a view of politics as a blood sport in which no strategy or tactic is off limits—including lying about election results. And lying about American history.
As president, Trump attacked The New York Times ’ groundbreaking 1619 Project , and established a so-called “1776 Commission” to come up with standards for teaching “ ‘pro-American’ history .” The commission’s approach was so intellectually dishonest and academically shoddy that historians of all ideologies decried them, and President Biden shut the initiative down. But DeSantis is keeping the lie going. After state Senator Randolph Bracy (D-Orlando) got the legislature to approve $1 million in spending to develop and distribute an educational video on the 1920 Ocoee Election Day Massacre —in which a white mob killed dozens of Black Floridians on Election Day in 1920—as “an honest recognition of our past,” DeSantis vetoed the plan. The governor didn’t explain why, but Bracy told the Herald , “He has been very vocal about not really wanting for us to teach about race in our schools, so that could be his reasoning.”
Yes, that could.
The fuller explanation is that Ron DeSantis is a demagogue who is ready and willing to inflame racial divisions in order to advance his political career. Even if that means he must lie about the past, and purge “the Party of Lincoln” of school board members—and presumably all others—who refuse to acknowledge that it took the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation to begin to address the systemic racism of 19th-century America, the civil rights movement and civil rights and voting rights bills to begin to address the systemic racism of 20th-century America, and a Black Lives Matter movement to begin to address the systemic racism of 21st-century America.
I guess that DeSantis doesn't want to face the racism/white supremacy history of his own state.
DeSantis thinks being Trump will get him elected to the Presidency. He's not Trump and, while I could be wrong, I don't think Trumpism will be a winning strategy going forward. Swing votes are definitely NOT on the side of Trumpism any long.
The headline is garbage and it doesn't get any better after that.
The obsession with race and racial tribalism will only end badly. The left no longer sees individuals, but racial groups. Any outrage is permissible in the name of racial justice.
It's a nonsensical theory that doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny, but it's poisoning our culture and the price paid will be astronomical.
This is the sort of racial conflict we have to look forward to....
Your beliefs will fall by the wayside.
And so will the idea of a country where everyone is created equal.
Sean, the absolute truth is that this whole quarrel over CRT is just some more strawmen built by **** and his followers so they can conflate and deny and scare the public into thinking that some fucking politician actually gives a damn what they think, when, if one thinks critically and judges information rationally and according to the overall soundness of the information presented, it becomes immediately apparent that anyone advocating for the banning of teaching on CRT is either a con-man or his mark.
I was at a local park the other day watching one of my nephews play 16" softball in a parish league. You have some familiarity with Chicago so you may know what 16" softball is. (These guys are really good by the way).
Off to the side of the foul line were a bunch of guys in softball jerseys waiting to play the next game. I was standing there watching the game, but I couldnt help but overhear the conversation between four or five guys . They were cops, talking about various things they had seen or heard recently.
Naturally a couple of them started talking about the way black people talk, making fun of it and imitating it. Then they started talking about how stupid black people they see on the street are. ( They dont say "black people" by the way.)
I have lost count of how many times I have overheard conversations like that in my life. It hasnt stopped because we are in 2021 or because everyone is "woke".
Yes, I played in my 20s... Great game.
Okay. But how does discriminating against other whites, or Asians, help? Do you think polish immigrants will he happy to be legally discriminated against? When will it be enough? Racializing everything will only give more power to the extremists.
Ahhh so all white people born up till the '60s are racist, gotcha. How many more generations do you think we need to go, in your estimation, till we can get past this systemic racism?
I'm not a racist so it's not up to me.
But you are white and born by the '60s or before, aren't you? Wouldn't that make you a product of a "white supremacist nation"?
It;s well known that white liberals are by far the most racist people in this country.
Don't believe me? Just watch them when a black person escapes the white liberal party plantation, otherwise known a s the democratic party.
Some of the most vile things are said about escaped blacks by these people,
You could fit what you know about it on a fleas ass.
That must be a huge flea ass.
What I said is true, there is no getting around it.
There are people who seriously believe that whites obligation toward people of color ended when the slaves were set free and the Indians were given reservations and made US citizens.
The end of the Civil War didnt solve anything about racism, it only solved the issue of slavery. The Civil Rights Act was 100 years after the end of the Civil war. 100 years.
But of course that's never been the case. The US government has spent trillions of dollars on their descendants. How many generations will require billions of dollars per year, do you think, to remedy the unspeakable horror that has been imposed upon their descendants by having to live in 21st Century America.
Would you admit that descendants of the slaves and the Indians whose ancestors were put on reservations live better lives than their ancestors oppressors, let alone their ancestors? How much is that worth?
Of course it didn't racism is as old as humanity itself. The only way it ever ends is when people stop assigning attributes or labels based on........
The government has been obliged to provide certain services/support for Native Americans such as IHS, IE, etc this is all from treaties that were negotiated by Indians who ceded millions of acres of land in return for certain considerations.
Of all the treaties that were signed between the various tribes and the US Government, the government has broken each and every one. There were 368 treaties signed between tribes and the US government and each of those was approved by the US Senate. All of them were broken by the US government. In addition to breaking all of the treaties the government who is supposed to guard the monies earned by the leasing of our lands for mineral/timber/grazing/farming unfortunately they were as incompetent and in many cases outright theft of our monies. The first major lawsuit that pointed this out and was won by the Tribal nations was the Corbell vs Salazar when the US government lost to the tune of $3.4 billion. There are others that range from $500 million to $1billion dollars.
There are many other areas that the government did its best to take Indian land and/or dilute Indian identity. The ''Indian Termination Act'' is one of my favorites and part of it was done right in your state. If your ignorant of that part of US history it makes good reading for the uninformed.
Of course, there were the ''Indian Boarding Schools'' that Indian children were forced by law to attend many run by religious organizations the Catholic Church being one that ran the most ''schools'' and of course sexual abuse was most prevalent.
No, won't admit that at all. When you look at the overall devastation brought on the tribes by the government it's not difficult for anyone with an IQ above room temperature to see that government policies towards Native Americans have been a disaster.
Have you ever asked yourself how many hundreds of trillions of dollars have been spent on the white population?
One of the things limiting our ability to make meaningful reforms is the narrow perception of the problem. While I do believe that some cops treat people of color unfairly, I believe the biggest problem with police is a policing problem, not a race problem. Police beat up and kill white people in the same ways that they do to people of color. It just doesn’t make the news and doesn’t inspire street protests. Nevertheless, it happens all the same.
And here may be a place where a subtle kind of racism is inhibiting progress. If white people see this as a black problem only, they are less likely to care, and therefore less likely to push for reform. But if all of America sees this as a problem that affects everyone, then everyone will have a reason to care. It may not be nice, but it is nevertheless true that people tend to care more about problems that affect them personally.
I don’t think so. I see this kind of thing a lot - especially in the form of the claim that people are saying racism doesn’t exist. They aren’t. They might say “systemic racism” doesn’t exist and I get why they would say that. When people think of a system, they figure they should be able to look around and see racism everywhere, but they don’t, because it’s not everywhere. They figure if it’s systemic, it should be enshrined in the law, but the law actually forbids racism (except at a very personal level) and has for a long time. I’m not saying that the argument for some level of systematic racism is wrong, but it is being poorly defined and communicated. Furthermore, the specific definition may not be that important.
But the claim that people are saying no one needs to be woke or that racism doesn’t exist rises out of this need to have people agree 100%. It’s the with-us-or-against-us attitude of modern politics. Too often, if someone doesn’t accept someone else’s viewpoint totally, then they are accused of supporting a bad thing that we can actually all agree is a problem. That just creates animus that distracts us from solutions.