I cried a bit and that’s the second time I watched it.
Nesrie
3340
I feel like several have already tried to explain the problem with your self decided root of the problem analysis, and you’re not really receptive.
I’ll try one more time and try to be as concise as I know to be.
One of the problems with believing that racism is somehow rooted to wealth and poverty is the belief that racism is rooted in facts at all which it is not. Also… it doesn’t stop with the poor.
And there of course are many, many, many articles and examples of this.
So no you can’t cure racism by lifting the poor. You have to address it separately, dedicate resources to it specifically and not ever, ever assume blanket efforts will just make it go away. That’s been tried and failed over and over and over again.
What if it isn’t the poor blacks that need lifting, but everyone, so also the poor white rednecks who vote fascist because racism is a way for them to kick down at someone else, thereby not feeling the bottom rung as they would if they didn’t. Also the cops who get paid too little to afford education, housing, insurances.
Racism and predatory capitalism arent the same thing. And curing one won’t end the other. But they do influence, reinforce one another.
Dont take this as a “all lives matter” argument. I feel your pain to the maximum extend of my sense of empathy. I wish this shit could be more easily healed, or there was a way to. But there isn’t.
For south Africa it took decades of hard fighting by the ANC who were labelled terrorists to finally break the back of the oppressor regime. And the healing still isn’t done, the inequalities still stand for large parts.
For a while it seemed america was well on its way. White suburban kids put rappers like tupac on a throne, listening to the stories of the ghetto. Then Obama. Wow. Soon the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes.
What went wrong? What happened? The internet? Trump?
I am in awe. If that is in NYC, like it looks, I would love to see AOC or some other local pol reach out to her.
Nesrie
3343
You don’t fix racism by pretending it’s not there.
You don’t improve things by not listening to the experiences of racism from black voices. Why the hell do we require videos every damn time. Are we supposed to wear 24/hr bodycams to be believed now?
You don’t address problems of racism if it only matters so long as it’s not someone you like, work for, love, live with, grew up adoring… like all these excuses to make a young man who takes a bat to black kids protesting as being “really a nice guy.”
You don’t fix racism by trying to claim that birthism is just politics and not the racist shit that it is.
You don’t fix racism by saying… it’s just because they’re poor.
Mmmm, Minneapolis city council member:
My only regret is that he isn’t my city council member. Though I think I like Andrea too.
CraigM
3345
What went wrong…
Well in part it is the system working the way it is designed. And by that I mean the system designed by the wealthy, the powerful, designed to protect said power and privilege. They made a pact with the devil. They knew the things they wanted were not, in themselves, powerful. A return to the Gilded Age was not something the common man wanted.
So class solidarity was, and is, a threat to them. So they made moves to break class solidarity by replacing it with race. A poor white man will support being oppressed if it allows him to oppress the poor black man. Rather than lift them up, give them someone to look down on.
And so we see the fruits of that today. Where racism is used to build a coalition for economic policies that give the wealthy more money and power, and curtail the working class.
So Trump is the response to Obama. The GOP deciding that a message of ‘that black man doesn’t know his place’ would be electorally successful.
Sadly they were right.
Yeah the sign says 12th street, so Manhattan. The person who posted it on reddit said they grabbed it from this instagram last night so that may be the source:
This thread is upsetting regarding Philly protests.
The culture wars of the 1960s were completed around the world and never, ever completed in the US. Basically US politics ever since then had been a morass of culture war wrestling match, rolling in the mud, never giving in, never surrendering, increasingly willing to blow it all up than concede.
The one factor about the intersection of a political culture of individuality and self determinism is that al change is rejected and resisted and never forgiven and never forgotten. Change is forced, it isn’t agreed upon, it isn’t through a change of heart. The change of heart comes after the compulsion, if at all. Politicians and populist rabble rousers make these issues into careers.
Trump is that rise of the “anti-“ in the USA. Anti- whatever, fill in the blank. They say X, “we” say Y. And the only way we’ll change is if you force us to change.
And that’s what you’re seeing right now - in the face of riots and chaos, the political system is being forced to address and make at least the appearance of change. Women’s in 2016 was peaceful. GOP politicians walked by the women to work every day, sipping coffee and giving them finger as they passed through the doors. There are no middle fingers going out to a angry rioters.
What went wrong was we elected a black man, and there was an outbreak of open racism from unreconstructed racists, and the Republican Party seized an opportunity to benefit from it, and wealthy whites went along to get tax cuts from the deal.
This is a great little story about sheltering protestors deliberately boxed in by the police in DC.
Maybe we can’t all get along, but most of us can get along if we talk. Great story, thanks for posting.
We HAVE made some progress over here. I cried when Obama won in 2008. What you’re seeing is the ugly backlash against Obama. He activated whites (and particularly white Christians) in a really nasty way, and Trump fed off (and fanned) the flames of their backlash.
(edit: scottagibson beat me to it)
To be clear, what he did to ‘activate’ them was presidenting while black.
Never meant to imply otherwise. I don’t think there’s anything Obama could have done differently. The mere presence of a black man wearing a tan suit was enough to trigger a much larger % of the US population than I imagined possible.
Man Who owned YaYa’s BBQ in Louisville shot and killed by police during protests. He used to give police free lunch regularly.
